Arthur Goes Fifth IV: A Sleep and a Forgetting
by Dead Composer
Summary: Arthur runs for president! Buster is abducted by aliens! Prunella turns into a teenager! The most shocking Arthur adventure ever!
1. What a Difference a Day Makes

This story is rated PG for violence and mature themes.

Disclaimer: After all this time and all the stories I've written, I still don't own Arthur.

----

_Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting._

_The soul that rises with us, our life's star,_

_Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar..._

- William Wordsworth

----

The alarm clock blared in the darkness, but most of the ringing took place in Prunella's head. She recalled climbing into bed the previous night, but had no memory of becoming drowsy or falling asleep--as if the whole night had passed in one heartbeat. It surprised her that the headache hadn't kept her awake all night--the troublesome headache that had afflicted her ever since she had been knocked over by a city bus and suffered a contusion.

To be more accurate, the headache had only troubled her since she had reversed her body switch with The Brain. It was Alan who had carelessly run into the street while inhabiting her frame, and now she was stuck with the resulting head injury. She had little to complain about--it was to be preferred over remaining in Alan's body until her own was fully healed. In spite of the pain, she had assisted in the defeat of Dark Augusta, who had descended from the sky to add Earth to her list of vanquished worlds. If she had tolerated the discomfort well enough to help save the universe, school and homework shouldn't be much of a challenge.

She sat up, yawned, stretched, and straightened out the front of her pale gown. Only twenty-four hours ago she had wondered if she would live to see another day, and now it was here. There was no need to worry.

She brushed her teeth, took a shower, and changed into her school dress. Her mother hadn't shown up to fix her hair as was the custom, but she thought little of this. Down the stairway she walked, expecting the scent of breakfast to waft in her direction, but smelling nothing. The lights were turned off in the living room and kitchen. Perhaps her mother was sick--but that wouldn't explain why there was no sight or sound of Rubella, who typically rose for school fifteen minutes earlier.

"Hello?" she called out, slightly perturbed. "Mom?"

No answer came. A second later her ears picked up a slight creaking from the general area of her parents' bedroom. The door slowly opened, and Mrs. Prufrock, her hair bound up in a net, poked out her groggy head. "Prunie? What are you doing up so early?"

"I have to get ready for school," replied Prunella, as if pointing out the obvious.

"It's Saturday," said her mother.

"No, it's Friday," the rat girl disagreed. It had to be a joke or game of some sort. The cataclysmic events of the previous day were still fresh in her mind. How could she possibly forget them? She had no recollection of an intervening day.

"Are you feeling all right?" asked Mrs. Prufrock with concern.

----

Prunella's eyelids fluttered open. Weak rays of sunlight were already slipping through the blinds, indicating that the alarm clock had failed to wake her. On one hand she was glad to observe that the sun was still shining, as it had temporarily exploded the previous day. On the other hand she was worried about being late for school. Why hadn't her parents, or Rubella, awakened her?

She yawned and stretched--and had the unmistakable impression that not only had her voice changed slightly, but her arms were much longer than before. She felt silk against her skin, as opposed to her normal velvet pajamas.

She sat up, and her legs reached all the way to the floor. Her body felt inexplicably different all over, inside and out. Astonished and curious, she lifted her hands to her chest, and gasped when they ran up against some things a girl her age wasn't supposed to have.

_I must be dreaming_, she thought. _This can't be me._

Stricken with anxiety, she jumped to her feet and bounded across the room to switch on the light. Her longer legs enabled her to make the trip in much less time, so that she had to take care to avoid colliding with the wall.

As the bedroom became illuminated, she realized that her environs had changed as well. Some of the furniture had been moved, some replaced, and some eliminated together, including the full-length mirror. Her Polly Locket dolls, which she expected to see standing on the dresser, were nowhere visible. The thin carpeting on the floor had been replaced with a shag rug.

Something very strange had happened--but strange things had been happening all week. She had switched bodies with a boy, been run over by a bus, and helped to prevent Dark Augusta from destroying the universe. This latest development surely had a explanation, and the only difficulty was finding someone who could explain it.

She hesitantly opened the door and stepped into the hallway. It was the house she knew, as the stairway leading to the lower floor attested. Her body sent weird signals to her brain as she shuffled down the stairs. Peering over the banister, she saw a rather familiar-looking young rat woman seated on the couch, which had been moved against another wall. The young woman had curly red hair, and wore a floral bandanna, a striped blouse, and a mini-skirt. She was watching a news broadcast on a large-screen TV, another item she hadn't seen in the house before.

It was unquestionably Rubella, though several years older. What especially surprised Prunella was that a small rat boy was seated on the couch next to her, playing with an action figure. The boy appeared to be roughly kindergarten age, and bore no recognizable features or family resemblance.

The older Rubella glanced up at her and smiled sweetly. "Prunie, you're awake. How are you feeling?"

Prunella only gaped--she had many questions, but the words wouldn't come.

"Have a seat," said Rubella, patting the couch cushion next to her. "I'll explain everything."

Still overwhelmed by the drastic changes in her house and body, Prunella staggered toward the couch with a zombie-like gait. Her older sister fixed a welcoming grin on her.

Once she had seated herself, the little boy clambered playfully over Rubella's lap and into hers. "Good morning, Prunie," he gushed, as if he had known her forever.

"This is Graham," Rubella informed her. "He's your little brother. We adopted him."

Prunella stared at the news crawl on the screen. The events it described were nothing like those of the previous day, and included no mention of the imminent presidential election. Finally a theory began to form in her mind.

"Am I...in the future?" she asked weakly. Her voice had changed, but speaking with another person's voice wasn't a new experience.

"No," was Rubella's response.

"But I'm older," Prunella pointed out. "You're older."

"What's the last thing you remember?" Rubella uttered the question glibly, as if she had rehearsed it a thousand times.

"Yesterday was Thursday," Prunella answered with a hint of uncertainty. "Dark Augusta landed on Earth. I tried to stop her by opening the Spiritus Mundi portal..."

"All of that happened more than five years ago," said Rubella gently.

Prunella's first impulse was to ask why she had no memory of the passing of five years, but she held her peace, supposing an explanation was on its way.

"You suffered a brain injury when that bus hit you. The part of your brain that stores short-term memories was damaged. Every morning when you wake up, you forget what happened the day before."

The description sounded simple enough, but Prunella didn't fully grasp it, or the impact it would have on her life. Only two things were clear--that she had become an 11-year-old girl in a teenage body, and that it would get worse.

----

to be continued


	2. Prunella's Plight

It was Monday, the first day of the sixth week of the school year, and Alan looked as if he had swallowed a storm cloud. The expression of worried gloom on his face seemed to drain the joy from every kid at Lakewood who gazed upon him.

Even Molly and Rattles took note as he walked past. "What's eating him?" Molly wondered.

"Maybe a famous scientist died," said Rattles facetiously.

No one dared ask him to share his troubles, except for a little first-grader with flowing brown hair--D.W. Read. The aardvark girl stepped in front of him, made doe-eyes, and inquired, "Why so sad, lad?"

Alan raised his head a bit and grinned slightly. "Where'd you hear that?"

"I made it up," said D.W. proudly. "But it only works for boys. Now if I can just think of a good word that rhymes with 'lass'..."

As Alan regarded the little girl's face, it seemed to radiate an unequivocal message--"I'm here if you need me." Only during the last few months had he grown to consider D.W. as a confidant, as someone who would respect him no matter what mistakes he made or what secrets he shared. Perhaps it was only because she was in first grade, and had yet to discover the joys of gossip. He recalled the ominous pronouncement of his time-traveling son, Jason, that D.W. would one day be his wife. At the time the idea of marrying Arthur's bratty sister had appalled him. Yet here she was, a year older, in the process of making the transition from 'cute' to 'pretty'...

"Walk with me," said Alan, placing his arm around the smaller girl's neck.

As they strolled in circles about the center court, he tried his best to explain his anxieties. "Something's wrong with Prunella. When she woke up on Saturday, she thought it was Friday. When she woke up on Sunday, she thought it was Friday. When she woke up this morning, the same thing. She thinks every day is Friday."

"Whoa," D.W. marveled. "Isn't that, like, the secret of happiness?"

"That's not what I'm talking about," Alan went on. "She forgets days. She doesn't remember anything that happened to her over the weekend."

"Maybe she has, like, insomnia," D.W. suggested.

"Amnesia," Alan corrected her. "I had...I mean, she had amnesia right after the accident, but she got over that. This is different."

"Why doesn't she, like, go to a doctor, or whatever?"

"She's going to get a CAT scan today."

D.W. smiled thoughtfully. "A CAT scan..."

"I mean a C-A-T scan."

"I know how to spell 'cat', duh."

"C-A-T stands for computerized axial tomography," Alan informed her.

"Whatever," said D.W.

"The doctors will take a picture of the inside of her brain," Alan explained.

"Eww!" D.W. grimaced. "Can I have a copy?"

Conversing with the little girl helped to lift Alan's spirits, and he carried his head a little higher as he entered Mr. Boughton's classroom. Next to his desk were those occupied by Marina and Mickie, as well as the distressingly empty one where Prunella customarily sat.

"Hi, Alan," said Marina, who had heard the boy unload his book bag. "Any news about Prunella?"

"Not yet," Alan told the blind rabbit girl.

"It's only a knock on the head,' said Mickie flippantly. "She'll pull through."

The teacher, a zebra man, started the class period with a roll call. "Prunella Prufrock is not with us today due to medical reasons," he announced. "We all wish her the best. Now, as many of you know, the Lakewood Elementary school board has decided to form a student council."

Mickie smiled confidently.

"Each classroom will elect one boy and one girl to act as representatives on the council," Mr. Boughton continued. "The secretary and treasurer will be appointed by the council, and the student body president will be chosen by popular vote."

Lucy de los Santos, a spiky-haired monkey girl, raised her hand. "Does that mean, like, the most popular kid wins?"

"No," the teacher answered. "The word 'popular' comes from the Latin word 'populus', which means 'of the people'." He wrote the word 'populus' on the blackboard. "'Popular vote' means vote of the people. 'Popular music' means music of the people. 'Pop music' means music for people who think the word 'popular' has too many syllables."

In Mrs. Krantz' classroom, the moose woman was presenting the same information, although with fewer digressions. "Remember, even if you're not elected to the student council, you can still run for student body president, okaaaay? We'll start with the boy representative. Who do you want to nominate?"

Francine immediately raised her hand. "I nominate Arthur."

The aardvark boy, seated a desk ahead of her, turned around and scowled.

"I second the nomination," Sue Ellen chimed in, and Mrs. Krantz started to write Arthur's name on the board.

"I nominate Buster," said Beat, raising her hand.

"Second," said Binky.

"Any more nominations?" asked the teacher, but the kids were silent. "Then we'll go on to the girl representative."

"I nominate Francine," said Arthur without hesitation.

The monkey girl waved her fist. "Go ahead," she said menacingly. "Second the nomination. I dare you."

After a few seconds of fearful silence, George raised his hand. "I, uh, nominate Fern."

"Second," added Binky.

"I nominate Beat," said Van, whose upper beak was still in a cast.

"Second," said Binky.

"I nominate myself," Muffy spoke up.

"Second," said Binky.

"Sorry," said Mrs. Krantz. "You can't nominate yourself."

Muffy turned to Binky and glared impatiently. "Well? What are you waiting for?"

Once the nomination process was complete, Mrs. Krantz took the votes. "All in favor of Arthur Read for boy representative, raise your hands." Five hands went up. "All in favor of Buster Baxter for boy representative, raise your hands." Six hands went up, including Arthur's. "All in favor of Fern Walters as girl representative, raise your hands." Six hands were raised. "All in favor of Beatrice Simon as girl representative, raise your hands." Five hands were raised.

"Congratulations, Buster and Fern," she proclaimed, "newly elected members of the Lakewood Elementary student council."

"Cool," said Fern and Buster in unison.

The remainder of the period was devoted to a lesson on how to write Japanese haiku, and the kids started to leave the classroom.

"It's nice to not have you in my head anymore," Francine remarked to Sue Ellen. "Now I can threaten people again." The cat girl rolled her eyes.

Arthur had just stuffed his books into his bag when Mrs. Krantz tapped his shoulder and drew him aside. "Why did you vote against yourself?" she wanted to know.

"I don't want to be on the student council," the aardvark boy replied acerbically. "All they do is hold bake sales to raise money for parties and stuff."

"The student council at my last school did a lot more than that," said his teacher. "They published the school newspaper, they helped at athletic events, they volunteered at the county fair, they washed cars to raise money for a new auditorium. Wouldn't you like the school to have a new auditorium, Arthur?"

"Uh, I guess so," the boy mused. "The one we have now isn't big enough."

"The student council gives kids a way to improve the school and the community," Mrs. Krantz went on. "It's a lot of fun."

"Hmm." Arthur fell into deep thought. "I can think of some ways to improve the school. Less homework. Clean up the graffiti. Fix the drinking fountains so kids don't have to suck on them. Get rid of that crossing guard who makes phony threats all the time."

"Those are very good ideas," said the moose woman. "Maybe you should run for student body president."

"I'll think about it," said Arthur noncommittally.

----

As soon as the bell rang to usher in afternoon recess, Alan jumped onto his bicycle and pedaled furiously to Prunella's house, anxious to hear the results of the girl's CAT scan. He felt like his nerves were wrapping around his throat and strangling him, and had to constantly reassure himself that nothing was seriously wrong with his friend.

The mood was somber in the living room of the old house. Mrs. Prufrock was in the easy chair, stroking the curly hair of the distraught-looking Prunella, who sat sideways in her lap. Alan could sense his heart icing over as he slowly walked forward.

"How bad?" he inquired nervously.

Prunella slowly turned her rat nose toward him. "Very bad," she said in a cold, bitter tone.

"The brain damage is more extensive than the doctors originally thought," her mother related. "Her ability to process short-term memories is impaired. That's why she keeps waking up and thinking it's last Friday."

"How long will she be like this?" was Alan's next question.

"They don't know," Mrs. Prufrock answered. "Years, maybe."

Everything Alan had feared was now reality. Prunella's life was ruined. His tender young mind could hardly bear it.

He reached forward in the slim hope that skin contact might alleviate the rat girl's misery, but she recoiled slightly. "I don't feel like talking to you right now," she grumbled. "Come back tomorrow, when I've forgotten what you did to me."

"Now, now, Prunie," gushed her mother. "Don't blame Alan. It's not his fault."

"I'm afraid it is my fault, Mrs. Prufrock," Alan admitted sadly.

Choked with emotion, he could remain in the house no longer. "Wait!" the rat woman called after him as he hurried away.

The sun seemed to glower upon Alan as he shuffled along the sidewalk. He had never known such unhappiness. His life was turning into a stage tragedy. Only a few days had passed since his sister Tegan had been separated from him forever, and now Prunella's mind lay in ruins, a victim of his foolish choices.

Drunken with the prospect of wonders beyond the realm of normal human experience, he had persuaded Prunella to trade bodies with him for a brief period. He hadn't considered the complications and responsibilities that came with borrowing another person's body. He had thoughtlessly raced into a city street in pursuit of the fleeing Tegan, only to be struck down by a bus. His memories scrambled, he had forgotten even the fact that he was really a boy. Upon recovering his identity, he had immediately employed the Opticron device to reverse the body switch, then destroyed it. He should have been smart enough to recognize the danger of using the Opticron on a brain-injured subject, and spent a few weeks, months if necessary, recuperating in Prunella's body.

He tried to look at the bright side. Perhaps the Opticron hadn't caused the additional brain damage. Prunella's body had been quite active in the days following the accident, in spite of the doctor's orders to rest. It was conceivable that if he had chosen to remain as Prunella until her brain healed, her fate might have become his own--to grow in body but not in mind, to live out a woman's life but remain a child. It would be hell, but at least no one would be forced to share it with him.

He wished he could make things right by giving Prunella his body again, so she could have a life. But the Opticron was gone, and so was Tegan.

----

to be continued


	3. I Remember Yesterday

The news of Prunella's dreadful condition quickly spread to all of her friends. They swarmed upon her house after school--the fifth graders, the sixth graders, a few from other grades, and some staff and faculty members. The most glaring absence was that of Alan Powers.

"Is there nothing more the doctors can do, Mrs. Prufrock?" inquired the worried Principal Haney.

"All they can do is wait, and hope that her brain heals," was the rat woman's reply.

Prunella herself sat curled up on the edge of the couch, her dress disheveled, fear and desperation in her eyes. She had nothing hopeful to say as the other kids tried to comfort her.

"At least you're still alive," said Buster.

It was the third time Prunella had heard that sentence. "I wouldn't call this being alive," she complained. "When I wake up tomorrow, I'll forget everything that happened today. When I'm an old woman, I'll still wake up thinking I'm a little girl."

"You'll get better," Beat promised her, "though it may take time."

"How much time?" the girl lamented. "A week? A year? Twenty years?"

Not only were the kids having no success at making Prunella feel better, but they, themselves, were starting to feel much worse. Some of them had watched relatives die of cancer or heart disease; some had stood by Sue Ellen when she had been (falsely) diagnosed with HIV; yet nothing had prepared them for the predicament in which Prunella found herself.

Kids came and went, but Binky remained. Mostly he sat in a corner, watching intently as the afflicted girl's friends offered their aid. When he was finally alone in the living room with her, he ventured forward.

"Gosh, Prunella," he said meekly, "I can't think of anything to say."

"What's there to say?" grumbled the despondent rat girl. "My life is over. Am I the only one who's accepted that?"

Prunella's sharpness stung his heart, but he pressed on. "I know you have a crush on me. You've had a crush on me for a long time."

The girl shook her head weakly. "Yes, Binky. Yes, I have."

"I'm going out with Molly now," Binky continued, "but if it makes you feel any better, I'll...I'll..."

"Kiss me?" A small hint of hope appeared in Prunella's voice.

Knowing his duty, Binky bent over. Prunella straightened up, closed her eyes, and waited for it to come.

Their mouths pressed together. For Prunella, the boy's moist lips were like angel food cake from heaven. Binky, on the other hand, didn't find it particularly pleasurable.

He pulled away, leaving the rat girl in a magical trance. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

Then reality forced its way back into Prunella's heart, and she lowered her head. "That was so nice," she remarked. "But tomorrow I'll forget about it, and you'll have to kiss me again."

"I'm willing to make that sacrifice," said Binky. Prunella groaned.

----

Alan lay on his stomach. At the moment, he felt that his stomach was useful for nothing else.

"Dinner's ready," announced his mother, sticking her blond curly head into the room.

"I'm not hungry," the boy mumbled.

He wondered how awful Prunella was feeling, and tried to make himself feel equally awful. It wasn't hard. One thing above all tormented him. The same temptations that had led him to this catastrophe were still in his heart. He longed for technology, for excitement, for power. The fantastic events he had passed through--sharing thoughts with Tegan, mall shopping as a girl, draining unwanted memories from the minds of his friends--had only whetted his appetite for more. He feared to imagine what he might do if he had another Opticron in his hands, or if Tegan were at his side.

He understood now that he was a Brainchild like his sister, like C.V., and like countless others. Separated from his sister, he was powerless. Mind-linked with his sister, he and she possessed the ultimate power--total control over human identities.

It was a curse. His parents would visit Tegan from time to time, but he would never be allowed to do so again.

He tried to soothe his troubled thoughts by staring out the window. Only a few kids were frolicking in the grass and on the sidewalk, most having gone indoors for dinner. One rather unusual thing caught his attention--a trio of girls, about his age, virtually identical in both physical appearance and dress. They were Siamese cat girls, who stood rigidly and in single file behind a Siamese cat woman whom he took to be their mother. All four were clad in simple blue velvet dresses, and the girls had red ribbons in their wavy blond hair. Their position was directly in front of the old Tibble house, and a certain rabbit woman was talking to them.

Alan's heart still shuddered every time he looked at Augusta Winslow--man, woman, savior, destroyer, curator, alchemist, witch, real estate agent. Her history was baffling and bizarre. He had originally known her as Angus Winslow, a dabbler in the mystic arts who had attempted to harness the essences of good and evil. His plan to create a perfect world had nearly led to global disaster, and as a side result he had been transformed into a woman, Augusta, with even more terrifying powers. Her next scheme, aided by April Murphy (Sue Ellen from the future), had threatened millions of lives. Only a judicious use of time travel had saved the day, at the same time creating a duplicate Augusta with the same eldritch gift. One of the Augustas (the one he was watching) had been stripped of her powers, while the other had absorbed the essence of evil from an entire planet, becoming the all-powerful Dark Augusta. In an irony of cosmic proportions, the good Augusta had been instrumental in defeating the evil Augusta and saving Earth from obliteration. Yet Alan still felt uneasy. What hidden resources did this woman possess?

A thought hit him. Augusta was still a world-class alchemist, and might know secrets that would bring about Prunella's recovery. He simply had to talk to her.

----

The room was beginning to light up, and Prunella snapped into consciousness. She was afraid to open her eyes, afraid of what she would see. She had experienced a strange dream--had it been a dream?--in which she was a teenager, and had forgotten five years of her life due to a problem with her short-term memory.

A realization struck her. If she could remember the "dream", then either it was indeed a dream, or she was cured of her memory problem.

She sat up abruptly. The vibrations of her body made it obvious that she was still a teenager. Recollections from the previous day flooded her mind. She turned and yanked aside the pillow.

It was still there--the flat, rounded, sapphire-hued stone that Augusta had spent five years developing. The stone that had been magically programmed to absorb her memories of the day's events as she fell asleep, and regurgitate them into her brain when she awoke. It had worked.

Thrilled beyond her capacity to express, she rose to her feet and leaped into the air with a cheer. Unfortunately, she had forgotten that she was much taller than before, and her head crashed painfully into a ceiling beam.

"Owww!" she groaned, rubbing her curly scalp. It was nothing to worry about--she had endured much worse head injuries.

As she hurried down the stairway, she thought about the many ways she would celebrate her new freedom. Other than Augusta, none of her old friends had visited her the previous day--they had all long ago become frustrated with her inability to remember their meetings. Now she would see them all, and discover how their lives had changed.

Five years' worth of back homework would be daunting, but not impossible...

Her mother was in the kitchen, still five years older, still sporting hair down to her hips. "Mom! Mom!" Prunella cried out with joy. "I remember yesterday!"

----

to be continued


	4. Les Triplettes de Belnap

When Alan peered through the front doorway of the Tibble house, he saw Augusta in a gray business dress, smiling and chatting with the cat woman and her three girls. The triplets stood politely and paid rapt attention--they were clearly the polar opposites of the house's former inhabitants, Tommy and Timmy.

The rabbit woman caught a glimpse of him. "Hello, Alan," she said welcomingly. "Come in and join the party."

The bear boy stepped inside hesitantly. "I hope this isn't a bad time..."

"It's never a bad time," said Augusta. Turning to the cat woman, she added, "This is Alan Powers, one of the fine, upstanding children who live in this neighborhood. He's also my friend. We've been through adventures you wouldn't believe."

The cat woman, who looked to be about six feet tall, leaned over slightly and shook hands with Alan. "Zoe Belnap," she introduced herself. "It's a pleasure to meet you. These are my girls, Amy, Becky, and Cally."

"Hello, Alan," said the triplets in unison. Given a closer look, Alan observed that each of the girls had a capital letter faintly inked on her forehead--either A, B, or C. There was no other obvious way to tell them apart.

Amy--the girl with the A on her forehead--giggled slightly. "You're cute," she remarked, gazing at Alan with what he feared might be affection.

"I saw him first," interjected Becky, the girl with the B.

"We all saw him at the same time," Cally, the girl with the C, pointed out.

"I know," said Becky calmly. "I was only making a joke."

Something seemed eerie and different about the well-behaved triplets, but Alan shrugged it aside.

Augusta patted him on the shoulder, which felt even weirder. "I'm giving Mrs. Belnap and the girls a tour of the Tibble house," she told him.

"I like what I've seen so far," said Zoe Belnap. She followed Augusta into the kitchen, with Alan and the girls trailing.

"These cupboards date back to the Victorian era," Augusta continued her spiel. "They're made of sturdy pine."

"Did you mention the house is haunted?" Alan chimed in.

"Haunted?" said Amy, her face lighting up. "Oh, how exciting!"

"Where's the ghost?" Becky inquired.

"In the cellar," replied Alan.

"May we go to the cellar and see the ghost, Mother?" Cally pleaded.

"Not now," was Mrs. Belnap's answer.

"I think you'd like the cellar," said Augusta. "It was remodeled over the summer. There's plenty of storage space, but no ghosts."

After she had shown Zoe and the triplets through the door leading to the cellar, she turned to face Alan. "That was uncalled for," she scolded him. "You don't know how hard it's been to sell this house, especially since the owner refuses to set foot in it."

"I'm sorry," said Alan, recalling the stories of weird occurrences that had circulated after the passing of Grandma Tibble.

Augusta smiled and laid an arm around his shoulders. She was going maternal on him, and it severely creeped him out.

"You came here for a reason," she stated.

"Er, yes," the boy responded. "It's Prunella. She injured her brain, and now she has memory problems."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said the rabbit woman.

"I was wondering," said Alan bashfully, "if you could check her out, and see if there's something in your books of alchemy that will help her."

Augusta sighed. "Even if I still had my Wicasta powers," she said in a discouraged tone, "healing the brain is a complicated business."

"But you're the world's greatest alchemist," Alan insisted. "If you can't help Prunella, who can?"

"If Rick were still around," Augusta reflected, "he might know what to do. Kron medical science is more advanced than ours."

"Where did he go?" Alan wondered.

"Back to Kron. He's helping to rebuild the time police. The Alliance is falling apart, and it needs the help of every member."

The immensity of the challenge boggled Alan's mind. Dark Augusta had wiped out six dozen planets, some of which had been critical to the Alliance's infrastructure.

"I...I guess that's more important than Prunella," he acknowledged.

"I'll do what I can for her," Augusta vowed. "Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a house to sell."

----

Mrs. Prufrock answered a ring of the doorbell. Augusta stood on the doorstep, her ears drooping a little, her blond hair bobbed and curled. Accompanying her was a little girl of almost three years, who appeared to be part rabbit and part dog.

"Is it true?" she asked expectantly.

"It's true," the rat woman replied. "The stone works."

Augusta could hardly contain her delight. Leaving her toddler in Mrs. Prufrock's care, she hurried to greet Prunella, who had changed into a dress and was talking into a cell phone.

"Hold on, Rubella," said the now-teenaged rat girl. "I've got company."

She laid down the phone just as Augusta's arms flew around her. "I'm so happy!" the rabbit woman gushed. "I didn't know if it would work or not. After so many years, you finally have your life back."

"Yeah, it's great," said Prunella, who was one inch shy of being as tall as Augusta. "Thanks for all the help."

Mrs. Prufrock led the little girl into another room, where her adopted son Graham was playing with building blocks. "I need you to watch Petula for a minute," she instructed the boy. "Don't let her swallow anything."

"Okay, Mom," said Graham.

The two children sat in the middle of a ring of blocks--Petula, almost three, and Graham, almost six. Petula's awkward movements and her mismatched face and ears were a source of constant amusement to Graham, who did his best not to laugh.

As he watched, Petula picked up a yellow block and laid it across her palm. In a surprisingly elegant gesture for a toddler, she waved her other hand above the block--and it vanished.

"Hey, where did it go?" Graham wondered.

Petula waved her hand in the other direction, and the block suddenly reappeared.

"Cool," said Graham in amazement. "Do that again."

----

"Poor Prunella," said Arthur dolefully.

"Yes," his mother agreed. "That poor girl." They were seated together at the kitchen table, and Arthur was staring thoughtfully at an almond croissant his father had just baked.

D.W. had brought home a copy of Teen Herd magazine which someone had discarded at the school library, and was browsing its pages on the couch, with a Tibble twin on either side. "There he is," she said excitedly, pointing to one of the pictures.

"Who's that?" Timmy asked.

"Justin Timberlake," D.W. replied. "He's, like, so cute."

"What does he do?" inquired Tommy.

"I think he's, like, a singer, or something."

D.W. turned the page, and a headline caught Timmy's attention. "Are...you...hot," he read.

"I'm not hot," said Tommy. "In fact, it's kinda cold in here."

"Hey, D.W.," asked Timmy, "why do you say 'like' all the time?"

"Because it's, like, the cool thing to do," the girl answered. "You should start."

"Okay," said Timmy. "I'm, like, hungry. I think I'll, like, get something to, like, eat."

"Me, like, too," added Tommy.

The twins hopped down from the couch and rushed into the kitchen. "Hey, Mrs. Read," they called out, "got anything to eat?"

"Arthur hasn't touched his croissant yet," said the aardvark woman.

"I will, Mom," her son snapped.

"I'm so hungry, I could eat a whole box of Twinkies," Tommy boasted.

"I'm so hungry, I could eat a whole Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings," Timmy one-upped him.

Upon hearing the twins' reveries about food, Mrs. Read grimaced, rose from the table, and hurried up the stairway and into the bathroom.

"What's wrong with her?" Timmy wondered.

"I guess she's sick, or something," said Tommy.

By the time Mrs. Read had taken care of her business and returned to the kitchen, the Tibble boys had helped themselves to some carrot sticks and were at D.W.'s side once again.

Arthur broke the depressed silence. "Mom, I'm thinking of running for student body president."

His mother smiled. "That's wonderful, dear."

"I think I would do a good job," the boy continued. "I know a lot of ways to make the school better."

"Go for it," Mrs. Read encouraged him. "Make the best of the time you have left here."

Arthur's eyes widened. Was his mother serious this time?

"Ever since the Crosswires moved out of their mansion, your father's business has gone way down," she went on. "We're barely scraping by now. There's a baby on the way, and Grandpa Dave really belongs in a home."

"But he is in a home," said Arthur.

"A different kind of home," Mrs. Read clarified. "A retirement home, where he can get better care."

"Oh."

"Your father and I have talked about this a lot. We think the best way to get back on our feet is to sell the house and move downtown, where there are more potential customers."

"Downtown?" Arthur gaped.

"You and D.W. would go to a different school," said his mother. "A bigger school, with more kids. More kids means more friends."

"More kids means less attention," Arthur disagreed. "I like being in a small class. Mrs. Krantz may be a little weird, but she spends time with each one of us."

Mrs. Read sadly lowered her eyelashes. "I wish it didn't have to be this way--but tomorrow morning, your father and I are going to the real estate office, to put the house on the market."

"T-tomorrow?" Arthur stammered.

"Don't worry," his mother tried to calm him. "We aren't moving right away. It can take a long time to sell a house, maybe as long as a year."

Her words fell on distracted ears. For Arthur, it was the end of the world all over again. This time he didn't face a planet-destroying monster, but the loss of his friends, his school, the neighborhood he knew. Precious little time remained to enjoy these things.

"I'll do it," he said aloud. "I'll run for student body president."

----

to be continued


	5. High School Disorientation

The next morning was Tuesday, a fact which one unfortunate girl didn't comprehend.

"Are you both crazy?" Prunella argued. "Today is Friday. Yesterday was Thursday. Friday comes after Thursday, not Tuesday."

"I know this is hard for you," said her mother comfortingly. "It's hard for us too. Remember when you were hit by that bus?"

"Mom, why don't we just make a tape recording?" Rubella complained.

And so, a grim daily ritual was initiated.

Prunella went to school that day, despite her family's fears that she would forget everything she learned overnight. Everyone looked at her with eyes full of sympathy. The Brain wouldn't look at her at all.

"Alan!" she inquired earnestly. "Is what they're saying true? Did that bus accident destroy my memory?"

"Yes," replied the boy, staring at his shoes. "Or no. It might have been the Opticron. I don't know."

Prunella glared at him as they walked to class, impatient with his refusal to face her directly. "I think there should be a rule," she remarked. "If you switch bodies with someone and get hurt, you should stay switched until you get better."

"I was thinking the same thing," Alan moaned.

"How would you like it if this had happened to your own body?" she chided him.

Prunella's bitterness only grew as the day went on, helped along by her inability to understand what was presented in most of her classes. Alan could do nothing to defend himself against her allegations of thoughtlessness. Finally she collapsed in tears during math class, and was sent to the nurses's office. Alan sank into despair, certain he would have to watch the same scene play out every day for the rest of his school career.

On his way to the cafeteria, Arthur made a side trip to Mr. Haney's office. The principal was at his desk, sucking on a lollipop and glancing over some academic records. "Mr. Haney," the boy declared, "I want to run for student body president."

The bear man drew out his lollipop and moved a notebook to cover up the papers he was viewing. "Excellent," he commended Arthur. "I was starting to worry we'd only get one candidate." He pulled a sheet from a drawer and handed it to the aardvark boy. "Here, fill this out."

"Who's the other candidate?" Arthur inquired.

"Michaela Chanel."

Mickie Chanel? She was smart, talented, and moderately popular due to her wealth, but was considered an insufferable snob by many. Arthur, on the other hand, saw himself as a champion of the little guy, the average kid. It would be an interesting contest.

After writing his name, grade, teacher's name, address, and phone number on the sheet, he held it up for the principal to take. As his arm moved forward, his elbow unintentionally struck an upright framed portrait, knocking it over the edge of the desk. Arthur winced as the sound of cracking glass reached his ears.

"Omigosh, I'm sorry," he said worriedly.

"That's perfectly all right," said Mr. Haney, who put down Arthur's form and started to collect up the broken glass fragments on the floor.

"Let me help," Arthur offered. He bent down and carefully turned over the frame and the portrait. It was a picture of a young aardvark woman with flowing red hair, wearing a pearl necklace. "Who's this?" he asked curiously.

"My wife," replied the principal.

"Gee, Mr. Haney," Arthur marveled. "I didn't know you were married."

"I'm not," said Haney, bowing his head in sadness. "She died four years ago."

"Died?" Arthur repeated, looking once again at the soft-light photo in his hand.

The principal nodded.

"I had no idea," said the stunned aardvark boy.

"That's because you're such a good boy," Haney joked. "I never have to call you in here, so you never learn anything about me."

"I'm sorry your wife died," said Arthur as he handed the portrait and frame to the principal.

"You don't need to be," said the bear man. "I've gotten over it and moved on. Good luck with your campaign."

As Arthur walked out of the office, Principal Haney tossed the frame and scratched photo into the garbage can. Opening a drawer, he reached into a stack of framed portraits, each bearing the image of his late wife, and pulled one out to take the place of the one that had broken.

Before he could stick the lollipop into his mouth again, a fifth-grade giraffe boy stepped into his office. "My name's Matt Blomdahl," the youngster announced, "and I want to run for student body president."

----

Trixie Tibble, a hamster woman who sported an ermine coat and a ruby necklace, dropped off her sons, Tommy and Timmy, at Arthur's house after school. It had become a routine with her. "Thanks for watching the boys, Jane," she said to Mrs. Read.

"Not a problem," the aardvark woman replied. She watched as Trixie drove away in her bright blue Porsche, another toy she had acquired with the help of her now almost exhausted divorce settlement.

The twins flew into the house, not stopping for breath until they reached the upper floor and D.W.'s bedroom. "Hey, D.W.!" Tommy blurted out. "Guess what!"

"Uh, I don't know," said the girl, who was working on her handwriting exercises.

"Somebody bought Grandma's house!" Timmy enthused.

"Awesome!" said D.W. excitedly. "Who?"

"Some lady," replied Tommy. "She has twins, like us."

"Except there are three," added Timmy. "And they're girls."

"Cool," said D.W., putting her homework aside and standing up. "Let's go meet them."

"No way," said Tommy nervously. "I'm not going back in that house."

"Me neither," Timmy agreed. "It's full of ghosts."

"I ain't afraid of no ghost," said the fearless D.W.

She marched down the stairs and to the side of her brother, who was dialing a number on the telephone. "Hey, Arthur," she requested. "Let's go to Grandma Tibble's house."

"Not now," said Arthur curtly. "I'm busy."

At the local Save Away grocery store, Beat was accompanying her mother on a quick shopping trip. Mrs. Simon had purchased several pounds of ground beef and a few other items in preparation for a barbecue, while Beat had selected a bottled soda to quench her thirst. As the clerk bagged her mother's merchandise, Beat idly picked up the soda bottle and moved it to the other end of the belt. This caused the belt to automatically engage, carrying the soda back to its original location. She tried again, but the soda once again moved back to where it had started.

_Hmm_, she thought. _There's an existential allegory in here somewhere._

She was about to take another shot at it, when her cell phone rang. "Hello?"

"Hi, Beat. It's Arthur."

Beat smiled. "Hello, Arthur. What can I do for you?"

"I'm running for student body president," came Arthur's voice. "Would you like to be my campaign manager?"

"Campaign...manager?"

"Yes," said Arthur. "I know you're interested in politics."

"I'm interested in British politics," Beat pointed out. "Why don't you ask Muffy? She likes to manage things."

"I don't think so," was Arthur's response. "I'm running against Mickie Chanel, and Muffy's always out shopping with her."

"I see," said Beat pensively. "Conflict of interest, as they say in the legal world."

"I could really use your brains, Beat."

The rabbit-aardvark girl sighed. "Well, all right."

She closed the cell phone and reached for her change purse to pay for the soda. The clerk, a middle-aged horse woman, smiled patiently at her.

"There you are, ma'am," said Beat, dropping a pile of coins into the clerk's hands.

"Thank you," said the clerk. "You're such a polite young woman."

As Beat pried open the soda bottle, the clerk's words echoed in her rabbit ears.

She gazed up at her mother. "She called me a young woman, Mum. I don't think the hormones are working."

Back at Arthur's house, D.W. was tugging at her brother's shirt. "Will you take me to Grandma Tibble's house now?" she nagged.

"Not now," said the boy. Picking up the receiver again, he dialed another number. "Hi, Binky. I'm running for student body president. Would you like to help me draw some posters?"

----

The FOR SALE sign standing in the yard of the Tibble house had been covered with a banner declaring, SOLD.

On the curb sat a small moving truck. A cat woman and her three identical daughters, dressed in similarly-fashioned working clothes, were moving boxes from the truck's cargo bay into the house. No furniture or bulky items were present, not even a TV or a bed.

Half a block away, Buster, George, and the anthro-Pomeranian boy Zeke England were curiously watching the progress of the move.

"My mom says they bought the house with cash," Buster remarked. "No mortgage, nothing."

"They must be drug dealers," said Zeke fearfully. "Or terrorists. Or...or witches."

"Or clones," George added.

"Let's not jump to any conclusions," Buster advised. "At least not until we find out what kind of music they like."

"Maybe they're aliens," George suggested. "This is the planet where Dark Augusta was destroyed. All the aliens will want to come here to visit...or live."

"Shut up, George," Buster snapped. "You'll give away the ending."

The three boys walked forward, although Buster had to prod the recalcitrant Zeke a few times. They met with the strange family in the yard, as the triplets and their mother were going back to the truck for more boxes.

"Hi," Buster greeted them boldly. "I'm Buster Baxter, this is George Nordgren, and this is Zeke England." The pom boy, too bashful to look a girl in the face, stared down at the grass.

"We come in peace," said George.

One of the girls, Amy (with the A on her forehead), turned to her sisters, Becky (with the B) and Cally (with the C), and they started to giggle profusely.

"Three boys," Amy observed. "Three of us."

"It's like they knew we were coming," quipped Becky.

"They're so cute," Cally gushed. "Especially the boy with the fuzzy head." She shot an affectionate glance at Zeke.

"Girls," scolded the mother, Zoe Belnap. "What did I tell you about flirting?"

"Never say one boy is cuter than another," the girls recited in unison.

"Very good," said Zoe.

Zeke, who had been quiet, spoke up. "Are you Christians?"

The girls exchanged uncertain glances. Even the mother appeared a bit confused.

"Uh, yes," Zoe finally replied. "We are Christians. Aren't we, girls?"

"Uh...Ave Maria, gratia plena," said Amy.

"Pie Jesu domine, dona eis requiem," said Becky.

"If you like to talk to tomatoes..." Cally sang.

Zeke smiled slightly, apparently satisfied.

"Those boxes look heavy," Buster remarked.

"Yeah," George added. "You could use something to help you move them. Like boys."

"How kind of you," said Zoe.

With the assistance of the three boys, the Belnaps unloaded the truck in almost no time.

----

"Rise and shine, Prunie."

The rat girl's eyes fluttered open. She immediately moved her hands to her chest, and discovered that she was still a teenager. The room was still mostly dark, and Rubella's outline was murkily visible near the door.

"I...I remember," Prunella mumbled. "I remember what happened yesterday. Augusta's stone worked." Her voice grew bolder. "It worked again. Now I can remember two days."

Rubella flicked on the light, causing her sister's eyes to recoil. "Sorry to wake you up so early. I figured you would want a full day to enjoy your new life."

"I do," said Prunella, sitting up. "I want to do everything today." As she rose, Rubella reached out and pulled her into a long, warm embrace.

The first order of the day was breakfast. The entire Prufrock family was gathered around the table, including little Graham.

"Where do you want to go today?" Prunella's father asked her.

"High school," the girl replied without hesitation.

"I don't think you're ready for high school," said her mother. "We'll have to see about putting you in a remedial class."

"That's not what I mean," said Prunella. "All my friends are in high school. I haven't seen them for...three days."

"It must seem like years to them," Mr. Prufrock joked.

"They like to hang out at the restaurant after school," said Rubella. "That would be a good opportunity."

Prunella recalled what the family had told her two days earlier--they had purchased the Sugar Bowl from Mr. Menino, and Rubella had turned it into a family restaurant called You Will Eat Here, with a hypnotic spiral for a logo. (They had considered calling it simply Rubella's, but worried that the patrons might stay away for fear of catching a disease.)

"Yes," she acknowledged, "but it wouldn't hurt to sit in on some high school classes, if only to see how far behind I am."

----

Words, or even thoughts, couldn't express how odd she felt. Down the sidewalk she shuffled in a tall, lanky body, wearing a blouse and miniskirt many sizes larger than what she was accustomed to, as well as an unfamiliar and awkward set of undergarments. Rubella walked beside her, lending encouragement; the girls were now almost exactly the same height. The neighborhood had changed little in five years, other than a few differently painted houses, and more traffic. Dandelions were starting to bloom, an indication of early spring. They passed by a grocery store parking lot, and Prunella noticed that about half the cars were marked with the word HYBRID.

They soon arrived at the entrance to Albertson High School, where dozens of handsome lads and shapely girls were milling about. No obvious changes in fashion or hairstyles had taken place. As Prunella looked at the faces of the boys, strange but pleasant sensations coursed through her body.

"Think you can take it from here?" Rubella asked her.

"I, uh, think so," she replied anxiously.

"Remember," her sister counseled, "if you run into trouble or want to go home, just..." She snatched the cell phone from Prunella's belt and spoke into it, "Call Rubella."

It immediately lit up, and the phone in Rubella's pocket started to ring.

"Wow," marveled Prunella as she hooked her phone onto her belt. "All the kids have cell phones now?"

"Naturally," said Rubella. "They only cost a buck a month."

In a moment Prunella was left to her own devices. She wandered through the crowd and into the school, praying she would encounter an older version of a familiar face.

It didn't take long. "Binky, look!" a girl's voice sounded.

A hulking youth was striding toward her, easily a foot taller than any other boy in the hallway. He wore a varsity shirt and shorts, his arms were tanned and muscular, and his bulldog-like face seemed to have been carved out of granite. Beside him walked a much shorter cat girl with a face like a cherub, a strapless dress, and curly orange hair tied into a large, drooping puff behind her head.

Prunella rubbed her eyes in disbelief as the pair approached her. "Omigosh! Binky! Sue Ellen!"

"Duh, what are you doing here?" boomed the bulldog boy.

"Shouldn't you be home in bed?" said the cat girl harshly.

"You don't understand," said Prunella, still recovering from the sight of the mountain-sized Binky. "Augusta Win...Augusta Bailey made a stone that gave me my memory back. I can remember the last two days. I'm cured."

The two high-schoolers only gaped stupidly.

"If you don't believe me, call my mother," Prunella insisted.

After a moment's hesitation, the cat girl picked up a cell phone from her slender hip and commanded it to "Call Mrs. Prufrock."

She heard the woman's greeting an instant later. "Hi, Mrs. Prufrock," she uttered in a whiny voice. "Prunella's at school, and she says she's cured. I say she's full of... Oh, really? Get out! Okay, but you better be right."

"Duh, what'd she say?" asked the bulldog boy.

The cat girl lowered her phone and motioned with her head for Prunella to follow them.

"First of all," she related as the trio strolled down the hallway, "I'm not Sue Ellen anymore. I'm just Sue. Sue Krantz. I'm the head of the cheerleading squad."

"And I'm Binky," said the bulldog boy. "I like to wrestle."

"I'm a sophomore," Sue continued. "Binky's a freshman. He was held back in seventh grade. We're girlfriend and boyfriend, and stuff."

To demonstrate, Binky bent his knees and gave Sue a peck on the lips. The gesture made Prunella quite uncomfortable.

"There'll be a quiz tomorrow," Sue warned her. "If you forget what I told you, I'll give you another mouth where your nose is."

"I like to wrestle," said Binky.

Although they were unpleasant to her, they were the only reference points Prunella had. No other familiar faces appeared out of the multitude as she walked alongside them toward one of the classrooms. Binky gave Sue a farewell kiss, then wandered off, presumably in the direction of a freshman-level class.

There were about twenty pupils in the room, and a few were rough and fearsome in appearance. Butterflies swarmed in Prunella's heart as she sat down at a desk, and she started to wish she had never left her house.

----

to be continued


	6. Girlie Man

Wednesday came. Prunella's condition remained unchanged, and she stayed home from school, sparing Alan the sight of her bitterness and tears. What to do about her situation became a topic of deliberation between her parents, Mr. Boughton, Principal Haney, and the school board. The mood in her sixth-grade classroom was so glum, she might as well have died.

Somewhat more removed from the tragedy was Mrs. Krantz' fifth-grade class, which was more occupied with the news that Arthur had declared himself a candidate for student body president. Binky, for one, had already taken steps to ensure his friend's victory.

"Hey, Arthur," he said, holding up a placard, "I made a campaign poster. What do you think?"

The aardvark boy curiously regarded the poster, on which was written, in crude letters, VOTE 4 ARTHUR R ELSE.

"Hmm...it's a good start, but I think you should add a picture. You know, like those Spongebrain Smartypants cartoons you used to draw. Something clever and catchy, yet simple."

"Gotcha," said Binky. Whipping out a pencil, he quickly doodled a vivid cartoon image of a big kid punching a smaller kid.

"Um...uh..." Arthur stammered when he beheld the boy's handiwork.

"Not simple enough?" Binky asked him.

As Mrs. Krantz began the roll call, the speaker crackled and Mr. Haney's voice was heard. "Attention all students. We have three candidates for the position of student body president. Arthur Read, fifth grade."

"Go, Arthur!" Francine cheered. "You rock!"

"Arthur! Arthur!" Buster chanted.

"Michaela Chanel, sixth grade," the principal continued.

"Nice knowing you, Arthur," said Muffy ominously.

"Matt Blomdahl, fifth grade."

"Who's that?" Binky wondered.

"The kid with the big neck," Fern informed him.

"A big thank you to the candidates," Mr. Haney concluded, "and to all the new student council members. Learning may now commence."

When the lesson was over, Binky approached Arthur with his latest concept. This drawing was one of a caped superhero with bulging muscles, an aardvark head, and round glasses. The caption read, BE A HERO--VOTE 4 ARTHUR.

"Don't tell me you spent the whole period coming up with that," said Arthur disappointedly.

"Yes," admitted Binky, shaking his head miserably.

Morning recess rolled along, and Matt Blomdahl was practicing his shots at the outdoor basketball court. He missed one throw after another, as coordination was made difficult by the fact that his head was a foot and a half higher than his shoulders.

While he struggled single-mindedly, the finely dressed aardvark girl Mickie Chanel approached him, wearing a devious smile. "Hi, Mickie," the giraffe boy greeted her.

Mickie didn't talk to him until her face was three inches away from his, and she got straight to the point. "I'll give you one hundred dollars if you withdraw from the presidential race."

Matt was floored. One hundred dollars? It was more money than he had ever carried with him. He could buy a truckload of comic books...a lifetime supply of bubble gum...

"You got a deal," he said with a toothy grin.

Meanwhile, Arthur was pushing D.W. on a swing when Binky hurried up to the pair, clutching another placard. "I've got it!" he trumpeted. "The kids won't be able to resist this one."

Arthur halted his sister, and looked at the new poster Binky had made. It featured a drawing of a comely young aardvark with round glasses, long hair, and a dress, along with the caption, DON'T BE A GIRLIE MAN--VOTE 4 ARTHUR.

D.W. exploded into laughter. Arthur groaned, certain he would bear the psychological scars for the rest of his life.

At that inopportune moment Mickie strolled up to the group, determined to bribe Arthur into non-participation. When she saw Binky's masterpiece, she was struck with a better idea.

"I love it," she said dotingly. Snatching the poster from the bulldog boy's hands, she placed it under her arm and skipped away, whistling a classical tune.

----

Arthur didn't recognize the true horror of what had happened until the next morning. As he arrived at Lakewood Elementary with his sister, they found campaign posters adorning every wall throughout the building. Each poster featured a brightly colored character who uncannily resembled Arthur, but wore a dress, a hair ribbon, and high-heeled shoes. Around the girlish image were written in a blocky font the words, DON'T BE A GIRLIE MAN--VOTE FOR ARTHUR READ, STUDENT BODY PRESIDENT.

D.W. shook her head disapprovingly. "Pink isn't your color," she remarked.

The pain was unimaginable. Arthur knew he had lost not only the election, but his good standing among his friends.

"Yo, girlie man!" Rattles taunted him as he shuffled toward Mrs. Krantz' room. Even Van Cooper could be seen laughing uncontrollably at the sight of the posters.

An indignant Beat confronted him as he entered the classroom. "Arthur Read," she scolded him, "you should be ashamed."

"I didn't..." Arthur tried to defend himself.

"In case you didn't know," Beat went on, "women have had the right to vote in your country for more than eighty years now. You just alienated the female half of the student body."

"It wasn't..."

"I can't help you when you undercut yourself like this, Arthur. I'm sorry."

"I didn't make the posters!" Arthur bellowed. "It was Mickie!"

The boy's outburst silenced Beat, who started to gape as the magnitude of Mickie's treachery dawned upon her.

"That devil," she muttered angrily. "This calls for a more aggressive strategy."

"Like what?" asked Arthur.

By lunchtime, Beat had made copies of a questionnaire and was circulating it among the students:

"My gender is: male/female"

"My reaction to the 'girlie man' posters is: indifference/hysterical laughter/more likely to vote for Arthur Read/less likely to vote for Arthur Read"

As the break neared its close, she returned to the classroom with a pile of completed surveys in her hand. The room was unusually crowded, as Principal Haney was present along with Zoe Belnap and her three daughters, Amy, Becky, and Cally.

_Triplets_, thought Beat. _I won't ask them. They might skewer the results._

She perked up her super-sensitive rabbit ears as she sat down, hoping to catch a hint of the conversation.

"We want to go to this class, Mother," said Amy.

"It has the cutest boys," Becky added.

"Keep your voice down when you say that," Zoe cautioned her. "You don't want to swell their heads."

"If you want to attend this class, you're welcome to," said Mr. Haney. "But remember, you're here to learn, not to check out boys."

From the corner of her eye Beat noticed that Buster, in the desk next to hers, appeared to also be straining his ears to listen. She grinned knowingly at him.

Buster leaned toward her and spoke in a whisper. "It's like they've never seen a boy before," he remarked.

After Zoe and the principal had left, Mrs. Krantz invited the triplets to stand at the front. The three girls made a formation, all hiding their hands behind their backs and tilting their heads at the same angle, like a robotic chorus line.

"My name is Amy Belnap," said the girl with the A on her forehead.

"My name is Becky Belnap," said the next girl in line.

"My name is Cally Belnap," said the last girl.

"Thank you, girls," said Mrs. Krantz. "Please sit down."

The triplets promptly obeyed. Amy chose a desk next to Buster's, Becky seated herself by George, and Cally joined Zeke at the back of the room.

In Mr. Haney's office, the principal was holding an audience with Zoe. "I'm sure my daughters will be happy at your school," the cat woman said contendedly.

"We do our best to please," Haney responded.

Curious, Zoe turned around the framed portrait on the principal's desk. "Who is this?" she wondered.

"My wife," Haney answered. "My late wife."

"That's so sad," said Zoe with sympathy. "But you're not alone in your grief. My husband died when the girls were babies."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said the principal. "Tell me more."

----

The history lecture was full of words Prunella hadn't learned, and questions she had no idea how to answer. Even worse, she was a year older than the other students, which meant she should have attended a class of juniors.

Sue noticed her despondent expression as they left the classroom, and it seemed to touch her, albeit slightly. "I hope I didn't hurt your feelings. You see, most of us gave up on you a long time ago. It was no fun, hanging out with a girl who never remembered anything."

"I understand," said Prunella glumly.

Students were filling the hallways, and one in particular caught the rat girl's attention. A short, skinny moose boy with broad antlers and a stoic expression was walking in her direction, his hands buried in his pockets. Could it be...?

Before Prunella could work up the courage to greet him, Sue deftly stuck out her foot and caught the boy, tripping him. Most of the surrounding kids laughed derisively as he landed squarely on his nose.

"Careful, Nerdgren," Sue mocked him.

Bruised and humiliated, the moose boy started to pat the floor frantically. "My contact!" he wailed.

Prunella watched as one high-schooler after another walked past the unfortunate boy without helping. Leaving Sue's side, she bent down and joined the search for the missing lens. She needed only a second to locate the gleaming object.

"Prunella?" said the surprised moose boy as she handed the contact lens to him.

"Is that you, George?" asked the rat girl, rising from her knees.

"Yeah," the boy replied. "Still having memory problems, I take it."

"Not anymore," said Prunella cheerfully. "Augusta found a cure."

"That's nice," said George with a hint of incredulity. He started to walk away, but Prunella followed him.

"I can remember everything that happened during the last two days," she boasted.

"Uh-huh," George muttered.

"The kids still pick on you," Prunella observed. "I guess that hasn't changed."

"They're just jealous because I have something they don't have. A future."

She accompanied him as far as the door to the men's washroom. "I need to clean my contact," George told her. "It was nice to meet you again."

Once inside, the moose boy laid his soiled lens in front of the mirror, pulled off his backpack, zipped it open, and extracted an object that was dear to his heart--a wooden giraffe dummy. Turning it to face him, he started to manipulate its mouth with his fingers.

"Why do you put up with it?" the dummy asked impatiently. "Why don't you just kill them all?"

"No way, Wally," George retorted. "I've worked hard for my perfect academic record, and I'm not about to throw it away."

----

to be continued


	7. Campaign Battles

When school let out, the irrepressible Belnap girls requested permission to visit the boys they had chosen at their places of residence. The boys found it difficult to resist such friendly and attractive girls, and were swept along for the ride. Amy followed Buster to the condo where he lived with his mother and stepfather, Becky accompanied George and Salma to their house, and Cally rode the limo with Mickie and the pom boy Zeke, who was staying with the Chanels as a foster child.

"I like your ears," said Amy as she and Buster walked down the hall of the condominium complex. "You must have very good hearing."

"No better than any other rabbit," Buster replied.

When they reached the door, neither of them had trouble picking out the sound of a puppy's excited barking. A little yellow dog greeted them with yaps and licks as they entered.

"This is Amazon Puppy," Buster introduced his pet.

"She's so cute," Amy gushed, bending down and stroking the puppy's fur. "But why did you name her after a web site?"

"I named her after Amazon Bunny," Buster told her.

"Who's that?"

Amy's display of ignorance didn't trouble Buster, since Bunny League was generally considered to be a boy's cartoon.

"She's a superhero," he explained. "She comes from an island where there are no men."

"No men?" said Amy, looking somewhat startled. "It must be an awful place."

Meanwhile, on a nearby sidewalk, George's unease was growing with each flattering compliment Becky rained on him.

"You have the cutest little antlers," she said sweetly. "If I had antlers, I would paint them rainbow colors and hang bracelets on them."

George's third-grade sister Sal took full advantage of the opportunity. "George has a girlfriend, George has a girlfriend..." she chanted.

Noticing the moose boy's nervous expression, Becky asked, "What's the matter? Don't you like girls?"

"He only likes boys," Sal chimed in.

"Shut...up...Salma," George growled.

The third Belnap triplet, Cally, enjoyed the hospitality of the Chanels in the mansion that had once belonged to Muffy's family.

"Who do we have here?" inquired Mrs. Chanel when she saw Zeke enter with the cat girl.

"This is Cally," the pom boy replied. "She's a new girl in my class. I think she likes me."

"How lovely," said the rich aardvark woman. "I'll ask Nestor to get her something to eat."

As she hurried away to fetch her Spaniard servant, Cally began to wander around. "You've got a big house," she observed.

"Yeah," said Zeke bashfully, "but it's not mine."

"Where do you live?" Cally asked him.

"My real parents live in a small house with a garden."

He followed Cally as she toured the lavish mansion, impressed with the sights but apparently not overwhelmed.

"I'd rather live in a big house like this one," she remarked. "Wouldn't you?"

"No," said Zeke flatly. "I want to go back and live with my mom and dad."

Cally turned and grinned at him. "You sound lonely."

"I am lonely," he admitted sheepishly.

Without a word of warning, Cally leaned forward and planted a kiss on Zeke's fuzzy cheek. The pom boy backed away, astonished.

"I'm sorry," said the cat girl. "Did I frighten you?"

"M-my parents say I can't have a girlfriend until I'm sixteen," Zeke told her.

----

"Maybe I didn't care about winning before," said Arthur with determination, "but I care now. Mickie Chanel is going down."

Joining the angry young aardvark in his living room were his campaign manager, Beat Simon, and his sister D.W. Kate tried vainly to attract their attention by performing somersaults and standing on her head, all the time babbling, "Look, Arfur," and, "Look, Deeduboo."

Beat reported the results of her informal survey. "Seventy-six percent of respondents chose 'hysterical laughter'. Of the rest, seven percent chose 'indifferent', eight percent chose 'more likely to vote for Arthur Read', and nine percent chose 'less likely to vote for Arthur Read'. The last nine percent were all girls."

"Go, Arthur, go!" chanted D.W., pumping her fists.

"Cut that out, D.W.," Arthur complained.

"Fine," his sister grumbled. "I'll just sit here and be useless."

"As of yet, Mickie hasn't put up any posters promoting herself," said Beat analytically. "That's not surprising, since a girl in her position can afford other, more extravagant forms of..."

A blaring voice from a loudspeaker on the street interrupted them. Unable to hear it clearly, the three kids ran to the window for a better listening perspective.

A limousine with speakers attached to the top was crawling down the street. The passenger side was facing them, revealing that Mickie herself was in the vehicle, talking into a microphone. "Mickie Chanel for Lakewood student body president," she intoned, and her voice was magnified and broadcast throughout the neighborhood. "Remember that name. Mickie Chanel. Someday you'll see it in lights. Hi, Arthur. Mickie Chanel for Lakewood student body president..."

"As I was saying," continued Beat as she and the others stepped away from the window, "a girl in Mickie's position can afford extravagant forms of publicity."

"And this is only the first day of campaigning," Arthur reflected. "What other tricks does she have up her sleeve?"

In a fantasy sequence, he imagined that he was aroused from slumber by a bright light from his bedroom window. Opening the blinds, he discovered that a new celestial object had appeared in the night sky--an enormous glowing orb resembling Mickie's head, complete with orange braids.

He had to notify the rest of the family at once. "Mom! Dad!" he cried as he burst from his room.

No answer came. A light was flickering in the living room, so he bounded down the stairs. His parents, D.W., and Kate were staring at the TV screen, their eyes glazed.

An eerie girl's voice emanated from the television. "You will vote for Mickie Chanel," it droned.

"We will vote for Mickie Chanel," repeated D.W. and her parents.

"Weewee boat for meemee michelle," Kate gurgled.

Beat waved a hand in front of Arthur's face, snapping the boy from his reverie.

"It's obvious we can't outdo Mickie in the publicity arena," she counseled. "So we'll have to run an issues-based campaign. I suggest you challenge her to a debate."

"A debate? What's that?"

"A debate is like an argument. You've argued with your sister before, right?"

"Okay, now I'm following you."

"Go, Arthur, go!" D.W. cheered.

As they took seats on the couch again, Beat outlined her plan. "A debate is basically an argument to decide who's the better person for the job. In your case, the goal is to convince the audience that your reason for running is to make the lives of the students better by improving the school, while Mickie's reason for running is that she has an ego the size of Neptune."

Arthur nodded. "I think I can do that."

----

to be continued


	8. A Pointless Exercise

Having taken leave of the teen-aged George, Prunella decided to look for a class that would make less intense intellectual demands of her. Who better to guide her in her search than the high school principal? The office wasn't hard to find, and the principal, a grim-faced rabbit man with graying hair, was at his desk.

"Excuse me, sir," she said bashfully. "My name's Prunella Prufrock, and..."

"Come in, Prunella," said the principal, who, as it turned out, had a rather nice smile. "I just spoke with your mother an hour ago."

Feeling less anxious, the rat girl seated herself in one of the available chairs.

"I'm Principal Morrow," the rabbit man introduced himself. "I knew your sister when she attended here. When your mother told me you were cured of your memory problems, I didn't want to believe it. You may not be aware of it, but the entire community has been concerned about your condition. It's such a tragic thing to happen to a young girl."

"I was wondering, sir," said Prunella, "if you could point me in the direction of a class that isn't too hard for someone like me."

"Hmm," the principal pondered. "You could try art class. That's in room 15."

"Thank you, sir."

"If you need anything, let me know," said Mr. Morrow as Prunella walked out of his office.

Art class proved to be a serendipitous choice, as the first person she spied upon entering the classroom was an attractive monkey girl with flowing red hair--unmistakably Muffy Crosswire. She was covered in a long artist's smock, and her easel supported a partially complete watercolor of a seascape.

"Prunella!" exclaimed Muffy, laying down her wet brush.

"Hi, Muffy," said the rat girl. "Long time, no see."

It was a happy reunion, unlike the callous reception her other three friends had given her.

"You're cured?" Muffy marveled. "How?"

"Augusta's stone did it," Prunella explained. "I remember the last two days."

"So Augusta finally did something right," Muffy reflected. "I mean, besides marrying my old chauffeur."

"Tell me all about the last five years," Prunella urged her.

"Okay, but I hope this is the last time I have to."

Prunella watched Muffy's expression grow solemn.

"Crosswire Motors is barely hanging on. Dad had to sell two of his lots to competitors. Mom keeps telling him we'd be better off if he went into a different business, but he doesn't listen. He says he'll die before he gives it up."

"Then you're not rich anymore," Prunella mused.

"Not by any means," Muffy chuckled. "But I don't need money. I still have my good looks."

"Still dreaming of being a supermodel?"

"It won't be a dream for much longer," said Muffy confidently. "Several modeling schools have already contacted me."

"That's great."

"And I won't be one of those ditzy models, either," Muffy went on. "I'll stand for political causes. Like stem cell research."

"Stem cell research?" Prunella repeated. "Are you for or against?"

"Haven't decided."

The art teacher allowed Prunella to paint a little, and the class ended. "Come with me," said Muffy. "English is next. Fern and Beat are in my class."

Excitement and anticipation replaced the anxiety in the pit of Prunella's stomach. She had finally found a sympathetic friend.

"You've got a nice body," Muffy told her as they walked toward another classroom. "Maybe you should consider a modeling career."

They encountered Beat and Fern along the way. Beat had grown into a well-proportioned young woman; her brown hair had grown much longer, and was held in place by clips. Her dress and appearance were as conservative as Fern's were not. The poodle girl sported various facial piercings; her nails were painted black, and streaks of her fluffy hair were dyed black.

"Look, Fern," said Beat, pointing. "Prunella's here."

"Omigosh," said Fern to the rat girl. "I haven't seen you in ages. I thought you were dead."

"She's cured," Muffy informed the two girls. "She can remember things again."

"That's fantastic!" Beat exclaimed. "If it's true, I mean."

"I hope it is," Fern added. "But we've been here before."

"That's quite an outfit you've got," Prunella said to her.

"It's for a play," Fern explained. "I'm immersing myself in the part."

"Which play?"

"The Importance of Being Earnest."

Beat offered kind words to Prunella as the four girls made their way through the crowd. "Cured or not, I'm happy to see you again. It must be very odd, waking up every morning under the impression that you're in sixth grade, only to find that you're a fully developed teenager."

"You get all the hormones, all at once," Fern commented. "If you don't watch yourself, you'll end up sleeping with all the boys, like Sue."

Muffy sighed. "She was such a nice girl, until the day she realized she could have any boy she wanted."

"If there ever was a child in a teenager's body, it's her," Beat remarked.

"April wasn't like that at all," Fern reflected. "She was mature and responsible."

"Was?" said Prunella, startled.

"I'm talking about when she was in high school," Fern clarified. "She's not dead. She and Odette went to Columbia together."

The subject for English class was the plays of Eugene O'Neill, someone Prunella had never heard of.

----

Friday morning arrived. Since there were no dire threats to Earth or mysterious disappearances to talk about, everyone discussed the upcoming election that would decide Lakewood's first student body president.

"Who do you want, Van?" Buster asked the duck boy. "Arthur or Mickie?"

"Definitely Arthur," was Van's reply. "I don't like rich people very much. What about you?"

"Arthur," said Buster with certainty. "I don't want to be a girlie man."

"I think Muffy's the only kid in our class who might vote for Mickie," said Van. "I don't know about Zeke. He's living with the Chanels, but he doesn't seem to like it."

"How are things going with your parents?" Buster inquired.

"Not good," said the duck boy sadly. "My mom says she'll file for divorce as soon as she finds a good lawyer. It's funny. She found a good lawyer once, and she married him."

A moment later Muffy entered the classroom, holding a stack of leaflets which she proceeded to give out to all present. "Big party at Mickie's house next Friday," she announced. "The whole school is invited."

As she tried to hand one to Arthur, the boy glared at her in surprise. "What, you mean I'm invited too?"

"The whole school, Arthur," said Muffy impatiently. "She didn't make any exceptions."

Since Arthur appeared unwilling to accept an invitation, she moved on.

"Did you hear that?" Beat whispered to the aardvark boy. "She called it Mickie's house. I think that's the first time."

With the addition of the Belnap triplets, there were now fourteen students in Mrs. Krantz' class--boys Arthur, Buster, Binky, George, Van, and Zeke, and girls Muffy, Sue Ellen, Francine, Fern, Beat, Amy, Becky, and Cally.

Once first period let out, Arthur set out to find Mickie, as he had a challenge to hurl. It wasn't hard--all he needed to do was follow Muffy.

"Mickie," he called out. "I want a word with you."

"Uh-oh," said Muffy, who was handing the undistributed leaflets to her friend. "The gloves are off."

As she stepped to one side, Arthur confronted the smirking aardvark girl. "That was a clever stunt you pulled with the girlie man posters," he said firmly. "But it doesn't change the fact that your campaign is nothing but hot air. The kids want a president who can take a stand on the issues facing the school, and I intend to prove that I'm that kind of president and you're not, by holding a public debate."

"Okay," said the unruffled Mickie. "When and where?"

"Wednesday," Arthur declared. "In the auditorium. The auditorium that's not big enough to hold all the students--unlike your house."

"Sure," Mickie agreed.

Muffy gazed after Arthur as he marched in the direction of the principal's office. "He's taking this way too seriously," she remarked.

"Yes, he is," said Mickie. "What's there to debate?"

She imagined herself and Arthur standing behind microphones on the stage of the crowded auditorium, as the students bombarded them with questions.

"What, in your opinion, is the best episode of Bionic Bunny?" asked Buster.

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Henry Skreever Fan Club?" inquired Fern.

"Should I dye my hair green?" asked Binky.

Mickie's imaginary scenario faded. "It's just a pointless exercise," Muffy told her.

----

to be continued


	9. Kissing Boys

After school ended for the week, the Belnap triplets once again insinuated themselves into the lives of Buster, George, and Zeke.

In Buster's condo, the rabbit boy returned from a snack trip to the kitchen, to find Amy cuddling Amazon Puppy in her lap. "The puppy's not allowed on the couch," he informed her.

"Sorry, Buster," said Amy, gently lowering the pooch onto the floor.

"I got some cheese curls," said Buster as he sat down, a bag of treats in one hand.

"I'm not hungry," was Amy's response.

Recalling something his mother had taught him about not eating in front of others, Buster set aside the bag.

As Amy spoke, she inched ever closer to the boy. "Are you going to the party at Mickie's on Friday?" she inquired.

"Uh, I don't know. The whole point of the party is to get the kids to vote for her, but I'm voting for Arthur."

"You can go anyway," said Amy. "Cally's been to her house. She says it's big and beautiful, with all kinds of food."

"Mmm," mused Buster. "Maybe I will go." A few feet away, Amazon Puppy was chewing on a piece of carpet.

By this time Amy's and Buster's legs were almost touching. The cat girl felt the time was right to move to the next level.

"I really like you," she said affectionately. "Can I...kiss you?"

Her expressed desire startled Buster, but not seriously. "Uh...yeah."

Amy moved her head forward like a snake, administering a closed-mouth smack on the lips that lasted about a second. To Buster, it felt perfectly natural and cootie-free.

"That was nice," said the girl as she leaned away.

Buster looked at his Bionic Bunny watch. "Hey, it's almost time for Bunny League. Want to watch it with me?"

Amy smiled seductively. "No, I'd rather kiss you again."

"Maybe later," said Buster, reaching for the TV remote.

"I want to kiss you now," Amy insisted.

"I can't see the TV if I'm kissing you," Buster pointed out. He clicked a button on the remote, and the screen displayed a commercial in progress.

As he stared at the television, Amy wrapped her hands around his head and tried to turn it so that his lips faced hers. "Whoa, whoa!" Buster protested as he tried to push the girl's arms away. Discouraged, Amy backed off and started to pout.

"Can't you think about anything besides kissing boys?" complained the flustered bunny.

"Normally, yes," was the girl's unhappy reply.

"What do you mean, normally?"

Amy looked away and didn't answer.

"If you want, you can scratch my ears while I'm watching the show," Buster offered.

After sulking for a few more seconds, Amy decided to follow the rabbit boy's suggestion, and carefully tugged one of his ears downward.

----

"You're the first girl who's ever kissed me," George admitted.

"I can't imagine why," said Becky sweetly. "You're such a cutie."

"Let's do it again," George suggested.

"Okay." Once more they pressed their lips together. The moose boy almost thought he felt his antlers tingling.

Their bliss was rudely interrupted by the flash of a camera. "Oh, yeah!" cheered Salma, who had photographed their liplocking with a digital camera. "The Elwood Times will pay me a thousand dollars for this!"

George leaped to his feet and scowled furiously. "Sal, I'm going to..."

The little moose girl started to quiver, expecting a terrible retribution.

"...kiss you!"

Sal squealed and fled while her brother pursued, making smacking noises with his lips.

----

"Please, Ezekiel," Cally begged. "Just one little kiss."

"Get thee behind me, Satan," Zeke muttered indignantly.

(Shortest...scene...ever.)

----

The Belnap girls had their fun, not knowing that an event with terrible repercussions would take place that very night.

A thunderclap awoke Alan in the middle of the night. Unable to fall asleep again, he figured a midnight snack was in order.

As he pushed himself out of the bed, he experienced an odd feebleness combined with an irritating pain in his joints. Fatigue almost overpowered him as he struggled to his feet. He didn't feel like himself at all.

He switched on the light and glanced in the mirror, and the reason was revealed. Staring back at him was not his own reflection, but that of an elderly, stooped rat woman with curly white hair and spectacles.

He screamed. His eyes flew open. He was in his bed again.

The same nightmare had tormented him three nights in a row. It was a prophecy of Prunella's fate--of a fate which he had been narrowly spared.

He hadn't recognized that the power to switch bodies undermined his most basic assumptions about life--the assumption that he would die in the same body in which he had been born, the assumption that the secret burdens of other people would never become his own. Never again would he exchange bodies with a person, unless he was willing to stay in that person's body until death, come what may.

From beyond his bedroom door he heard faint but worried voices--those of his parents, and one or two other people. According to the digital clock, it was between two and three a.m.--a strange time for Mom and Dad to be accommodating guests. Something was wrong.

Still in his pajamas, he crept quietly to the door and noiselessly opened it. The scene before him reminded him of a recent occurrence, namely, Tegan's disappearance. His parents were talking with Dr. Payne and Dr. Minkowski, the scientists from Ballford Prep. It could only mean that Tegan was in trouble again.

Unable to contain his fear, he burst out of the room. "Mom! Dad!" he exclaimed. "What happened? Is Tegan okay?"

His parents turned around, and they appeared quite consternated, although their words didn't reflect it.

"Tegan's all right," Mrs. Powers reassured her son. "Go back to bed."

From that moment onward they spoke in hushed tones with the scientists, occasionally looking backwards to see if Alan had retired to his room yet. There could be no doubt--they were keeping something from him.

He would figure out the truth, if he had to lie awake for the rest of the night. As he stepped into the bedroom, determined to do exactly that, his ears picked up the voices of two other people who were approaching the front entrance. He turned around, and managed to catch a glimpse of the newcomers.

They were C.V.'s parents, the Oberlins.

It was the last straw--Alan would no longer be denied. He charged into the midst of the group of concerned adults, declaring, "Something's going on here, and I want to know what it is. Now."

His parents, the scientists, and the owl couple fell silent and glared at him.

Then Dr. Cindy Payne spoke. "Someone broke into the school," the poodle woman informed him. "They didn't take anything of value. All the kids are fine."

Alan mulled what he had been told--and a terrifying thought entered his mind. "Mansch," he muttered.

Dr. Payne cocked her ears. "What?"

"He's a professional thief," Alan said more audibly. "If anyone can get through the school's security system, he can. And he has a reason to. He wants to free the Brainchildren."

A wave of shock passed over the faces of the two Ballford doctors, as if Alan had uttered a top-secret word.

Dr. Payne regained her composure. "I just told you," she said firmly, "the kids are fine."

"Go to bed, Alan," Mrs. Powers ordered.

The boy remained stubborn, until it became clear that no one would speak another word until he obeyed.

He lay on his back, unable to rest or to think about anything but the break-in at the school. Had Mansch succeeded? If so, what did it mean?

----

to be continued


	10. Little Cakeface

Although he hadn't slept well at all, Alan rose from his bed the moment he awoke. His parents were sitting in the dining room, a newspaper laid flat on the table between them. Their bleary eyes and morose expressions, and the strong smell of coffee, suggested that they had remained awake all night.

He took a glance at the paper, as if expecting to see a story about the break-in at Ballford Prep, but found nothing. It was too soon for the local newspaper to have picked up such a story, but there might be a late-breaking news flash on the Elwood Times Internet site.

He turned on the computer and browsed the site, but the information he found was succinct and no more helpful than what his parents had told him. "An intruder broke into Ballford Preparatory School on Friday night. The unknown person or persons succeeded in breaching the main entrance before being detected by a sensor that alerted the police. No suspects were taken into custody. Nothing of value was removed." That was the essence of it.

How could it have been Mansch? Alan asked himself. The man was far too smart to be thwarted so easily. Unless Mansch was indeed the culprit, and had enjoyed greater success than the school administrators were willing to divulge.

He was staring at the computer screen, deep in thought, when he noticed an old gray head peeping into the room. It was Mrs. McGrady, long-time cafeteria employee and good friend of the Powers family. He hadn't sensed her arrival.

"Good morning, Alan," she said sweetly. "How's my little cakeface?"

He hated it when she called him that. Apparently she had watched him try to eat cake as a toddler, and the image had never left her mind.

"I've been better," said Alan wearily.

He soon learned that Mrs. McGrady's business was not to his liking. "We're going to Ballford Prep to check on Tegan," his father told him. "You'll stay with Sarah while we're gone."

"Lovely," was Alan's sarcastic response.

"We'll have so much fun," gushed Mrs. McGrady, pinching Alan's cheek. "You can help me work on my new quilt."

"Mom, Dad," inquired Alan, "why are you going to see Tegan? Dr. Payne said she was all right."

"She may be frightened because of what happened last night," replied his mother. "We just want to lend a little support."

Alan's suspicions grew. He had been inside of Tegan's mind several times, and was sure that something as mild as a break-in wouldn't scare her.

Too tired to put up any resistance, he allowed Mrs. McGrady to take him away in her rusted old Chevy. "The kids don't visit me much anymore," she babbled. "The last one was Fern. She just showed up and asked if she could stay the night. I guess she was hiding from someone. I was lonely, so I let her stay."

"Uh-huh," Alan mumbled.

"The kids think I'm crazy, don't they?"

"Uh-huh."

The old woman's face drooped. "Oh, well. I've heard it said--who's crazier, the crazy person, or the crazy person who thinks the crazy person's crazy?"

Shortly Alan entered Mrs. McGrady's house, a compulsively tidy place of residence with blues posters adorning the walls and books about various philosophies and religions on the shelves. "Help yourself to whatever's in the refrigerator," she told him. "If you want to watch TV, I have a nice selection of children's DVDs."

He opened the refrigerator door and looked inside. Aside from the usual butter, eggs, and bread, he saw several plastic containers holding unrecognizable and unappetizing substances in various shades of red and brown. "So this is where mystery meat comes from," he realized.

Closing the refrigerator, he told Mrs. McGrady, "I'm not hungry. I think I'll go to Arthur's and hang out."

"Your parents told me not to let you out until they get back," said the lunch lady.

Alan was stunned. "Why not?"

"They didn't say."

Things were making less and less sense. Were his parents trying to protect him from someone? Did they think the thieves who had taken "nothing of value" from Ballford Prep would come after him?

With a sigh, Alan turned to the rack of children's movies next to the TV. He soon settled on an educational DVD which bore the tag line, "You think your piano teacher's tough--I've got Beethoven!"

----

The small auditorium was packed, and many students had to stand in the aisles. On the stage, Arthur and Mickie had taken up microphones in preparation for the historic debate that might decide who would lead the Lakewood Elementary student body. Principal Haney acted as moderator.

"The candidates will now answer questions from the audience," he announced.

Many hands went up, and Mr. Haney pointed at Molly. "As president, what would you do to make it easier for students to get to school?" asked the rabbit girl.

Mickie made a gesture with her hand, and the back wall of the stage split apart, revealing the presence of a shiny new PT Cruiser.

"Everybody gets a CAR!" she shouted to the cheering audience.

In reality, the debate was four days away, but Arthur was consumed with worries about what might go wrong.

"Let's pretend that D.W. is Mickie, and I'm the audience, and you're...er, Arthur," said Beat, who was coaching the boy through a debate simulation.

"Can I be the audience, too?" came a tired-sounding voice. Grandpa Dave had emerged from the guest bedroom, propelling himself on a walker.

"Sure, Grandpa," said Arthur, helping the old man to seat himself on the couch.

"Question number one," Beat began. "As president, what would you do about the cracks in the stairs leading to the school entrance? Mickie? Er, Mickie?"

"Oh, that's me," said D.W., snapping to attention. "Uh, I would invite Justin Timberlake to sing at a concert, and with the money from the tickets I would pay for the stairs to be fixed."

"Thank you, Mickie. Arthur?"

The aardvark boy cleared his throat. "I would round up some volunteers, and go door to door raising funds to patch up the stairway."

"Thank you, Arthur."

"I have a question," said Grandpa Dave. "What would you do about those women who show their belly buttons on TV?"

Arthur, D.W., and Beat stared blankly at him. Kate toddled through the room, with Pal nipping at her heels.

"Well, something's got to be done about it," the old aardvark man continued. "All this revealing clothing on women is taking the nation down the wrong path."

"Right," said Beat in an annoyed tone. "Next question. Do you think hall monitors should be introduced at Lakewood? Mickie?"

"The moral fabric of our great country is unraveling," Grandpa Dave interrupted. "I can see it right in front of me. Little girls are developing faster than they should. They don't want to wait until they're thirteen anymore."

"I didn't choose to be this way, you old coot," said Beat sharply.

Grandpa didn't seem to hear. "And those women on TV with their belly buttons," he rambled on. "It's revolting, I tell you."

"Let's go to your place," Arthur suggested to Beat.

----

"My wife died of a congenital heart defect," Mr. Haney recounted. "We knew when we were married that she might not have long for this world, but we hoped and prayed for the best. Sadly, we didn't get it."

At the Muffin Man cafe, the principal had met over coffee with Zoe Belnap, mother of triplets and new resident of the old Tibble house. It was a sunny, cloudless Saturday afternoon.

"I'm terribly sorry about your misfortune," said Zoe comfortingly. "It's painful to lose someone you love so much."

"I don't mean to pry," said Haney after a sip of coffee, "but you haven't told me about the circumstances of your husband's death."

Zoe hesitated, choosing her words carefully. "He died of a terminal illness."

"So it was a similar situation," Haney mused.

"The girls were fifteen months old," Zoe went on. "They never knew him."

"It must have been hard, raising them by yourself."

"It was. Money wasn't a problem. Work wasn't a problem. But the loneliness...oh, the loneliness."

Smitten with compassion, Mr. Haney put forth a hand and covered Zoe's fingers with it. The cat woman smiled wistfully.

----

Saturday afternoon continued to be sunny and cloudless. It was a perfect day for riding a bike or taking a dip in the pool, but Alan could do neither. His parents hadn't returned from their trip to Ballford Prep, and Mrs. McGrady forbade him to leave her house.

Desperate for something to distract him from thoughts of Prunella and Tegan, he took up the lunch lady's offer to teach him quilting. After a few stitches, however, his nose started to run--it appeared he was allergic to duck down. "Don't you have any cotton?" he asked.

"I'm allergic to the stuff," Mrs. McGrady replied.

It was almost dark, and he had endured almost unimaginable boredom, when his parents finally came to retrieve him.

"Thanks for watching our little boy, Sarah," said Mrs. Powers as she left the house with Alan in tow. It was something he hadn't heard her say to a babysitter for at least four years.

They drove away, but not in the direction of their house. "Tegan says hello," his father uttered glibly.

"Hello?" was Alan's incredulous response. "She'll never see me again, and all she has to say is hello?"

Mr. Powers answered nothing, but continued to drive. Within minutes they were on the entrance ramp to the highway.

"Where are we going?" Alan inquired.

"Oh, I guess I didn't tell you," his mother replied. "Aunt Frieda and uncle Larry called us yesterday for the first time in three months. They invited us to visit."

"But that's two hundred miles away," the bear boy pointed out.

"They said we can spend the night," said Mrs. Powers.

Alan began to wonder if he would ever see home again...

----

to be continued


	11. The Debate

For the next few days, Alan wasn't allowed to go anywhere unless one of his parents drove him. Whenever he asked them about Tegan, they gave unhelpful and evasive answers. News sources proved uninformative as well. Two theories occurred to him. One, someone had harmed Tegan and the other Brainchildren, and might be coming after Alan. Two, Tegan was unaccounted for, and might be trying to reunite with her brother, something his parents and the school administrators could not allow.

He no longer saw Prunella. Every morning after her family had explained her predicament, she invariably cast the blame on him. Her condition showed no sign of improvement.

----

"There's one way to see if she's cured," suggested the fifteen-year-old Arthur Read, a strapping aardvark lad who had used contact lenses to turn his eyes from little black dots to white saucers. "Ask her what happened yesterday, and the day before that."

"What happened where?" asked Francine. She sat next to him in the high school lunchroom, wearing jeans and a white blouse with a collar, her long hair bound into a ponytail.

"Uh...on TV," said Arthur.

"I remember seeing something on the news about the world record for biggest pumpkin being broken," said Prunella.

"I saw that," said Fern. "It was two days ago."

"And there are some new cable networks," Prunella went on. "The Reality Network, the Medical Drama Network, the Fighting Robots Anime Network, the Friends Spinoff Network..."

"Oh, I love Friends spinoffs," Muffy enthused.

"And there was a terrorist attack against the U.S. troops in Karjakistan," Prunella recalled.

"There's one every week," said Beat.

"And doctors found a cure for HIV."

Prunella's friends exchanged wondering glances.

"She really is better," Arthur marveled.

"This is a happy day," Francine added. "We should throw a party."

"I'll bring the beer," Beat offered.

"Beer?" Prunella gaped in surprise.

"Don't forget," Fern counseled the others. "She's still a sixth-grader at heart."

"Yeah," said Muffy. "She probably thought we were talking about a poetry and tea party."

"Now that you're cured," Arthur asked Prunella, "what are your plans?"

"I haven't made any," the rat girl answered. "I guess I'll have to catch up on the five years of school I missed. I'm supposed to be a grade ahead of you."

"Speaking of which," said Francine, "where are all your old friends from sixth grade?"

"They're here somewhere," Prunella replied. "But they're unimportant to the story, so we won't mention them anymore."

"You should buy a car," Fern suggested. "You're old enough to drive now."

"But I don't know how to drive," Prunella pointed out.

"Take driver's ed," Francine recommended. "My sister teaches it."

"That's where I'm going after school," said Muffy. "I've spent my whole life surrounded by cars, and soon I'll be able to drive one."

"There goes the neighborhood," Beat quipped.

"I haven't seen Buster anywhere," Prunella realized.

Arthur and Francine looked at each other solemnly.

"Well?" the rat girl demanded. "Where is he?"

Arthur shook his head sadly. "He's gone."

"Gone?" Prunella's jaw quivered. "You mean dead?"

"Nobody knows," said Francine. "He just disappeared."

"It happened not long after your accident," Fern told Prunella.

"Some people believe he was abducted by extraterrestrials," said Beat.

"Gosh, do you think he really was?" said Prunella in a worried tone. "After all, we did meet a real alien."

"After the Dark Augusta battle," Arthur recalled, "the aliens pretty much left us alone."

"He was such a weird kid," said Fern plaintively. "But I miss him."

"I don't believe it," said Prunella, shaking her head. "Did anyone else disappear?"

"Nope," Muffy answered. "Van Cooper's been sick, and his mom's teaching him at home. Mickie Chanel moved into a bigger mansion. As for your good friend Alan Powers, he's right over there."

Prunella's eyes followed Muffy's pointing finger to a distant table, where a drably dressed, somewhat overweight bear boy sat alone. A short mop of unkempt hair adorned his scalp, and his back was slightly hunched. He was slowly raising a loaded fork to his mouth.

As she watched him, anger filled her heart--anger that had built up for three days instead of only one.

"I still don't understand why you blame him," Arthur remarked. "Or why he blames himself."

"It's a long story," said Prunella bitterly.

----

The small auditorium was packed, and many students had to stand in the aisles. On the stage, Arthur and Mickie had taken up microphones in preparation for the historic debate that might decide who would lead the Lakewood Elementary student body. Principal Haney acted as moderator.

This time it was for real. Butterflies waltzed in Arthur's stomach as he looked up and down the audience, trying to appear composed. His opponent stood still and smiled, apparently untroubled. Beat and D.W., sitting in the front row, gave a thumbs-up to the nervous aardvark boy.

"The candidates will now answer questions from the audience," the principal announced.

Many hands shot up, and Haney pointed at a sixth-grade poodle boy. "As president, what would you do to improve the quality of the cafeteria food?" the boy inquired.

All the kids fell silent. "Mickie, you start," Mr. Haney instructed.

The aardvark girl was wearing a business-like dress and high heels, and her red hair was fixed in a bun. Arthur, on the other hand, wore his usual yellow sweater and jeans.

"If I am elected," Mickie began, "I promise to reform the cafeteria menu. You'll get Chicken Licken on Mondays, Burger King on Tuesdays, Dunkin Donuts on Wednesdays..."

"Excuse me," Arthur boldly interrupted. "What you're proposing is not only nutritionally unwise, but extremely expensive. How will you pay for all that restaurant food?"

"With my own money, of course," Mickie replied haughtily. "Have you forgotten I'm rich?"

"I don't care how rich you are," Arthur retorted. "You can't afford stock the cafeteria with fast food forever."

"Forever?" Mickie chuckled. "I'll only be president for the rest of the school year."

The kids moved their gaze back and forth between the feuding candidates. On one hand they thrilled at the prospect of a daily offering of restaurant food; on the other they suspected that Mickie was promising them pie in the sky, and would fail to deliver.

"Let's hear your answer, Arthur," said the principal.

"If I am elected," Arthur spoke into the microphone, "I promise to lead a team of researchers which will investigate the nature and source of this so-called 'mystery meat'. In addition, I will personally ensure that all of the cafeteria items are labeled with ingredients and nutritional information."

"What do you mean, personally?" was Mickie's rebuttal. "Do you propose to check all the items in the cafeteria, every day?"

"Yes, I do," Arthur assured her. "While you cross town in your limo to eat at some Chinese place, I stand in a long cafeteria line. I have plenty of time to inspect the quality of the food and its labeling."

"Good show, Arthur," Beat muttered under her breath. "Make her look like the champion of the rich that she is."

"Next question," said Mr. Haney, and more hands were raised.

"As president," George called out, "what would you do about the bully problem?"

Before Arthur could form a response in his mind, he looked toward the right end of the second row, where Rattles, Molly, and the other Tough Customers were scowling brutishly at him.

"I would implement a 'three strikes, you're out' policy," Mickie stated. "If you're caught bullying three times, you're automatically expelled."

The faces of the kids seemed to be pleading with Arthur to come up with a more effective plan. He suddenly knew that the key to victory was to adress their needs in the firmest manner possible, despite the personal risk to himself.

"Your plan focuses on punishment," Arthur pointed out. "We already punish bullies. My plan is all about prevention. If you visited our playground more often, you'd notice that bullies never attack groups of kids--only isolated ones. I'm not just talking about the geeky kids and the kids with bad hygiene. I'm talking about the new kid, the kid who doesn't quite fit in, the kid who prefers to be alone. Most of you have been that kind of kid at one time in your lives."

"Get to the point," said Mickie sharply.

"As president, I will implement a posse program. All the students who don't have posses already will be assigned to new posses. These posses will always stay together while on the school property. The bullies won't dare cause trouble."

"That's a good idea," said George. Becky sat next to him, holding his hand and smiling.

"I know who I'm not voting for," Rattles grumbled.

The debate ended after half an hour of questions and answers, and the candidates shook hands civilly. All the kids who hadn't become bored applauded and chanted the name of their preferred candidate. As they walked out of the auditorium, Buster and Amy handed them exit polls at one door, while Muffy did the same at the other.

Beat's praise for Arthur was fervent. "You did gloriously!" she gushed. "You had her on the defensive the entire time."

"You da man, Arthur," D.W. commended him.

"If my mum hadn't prohibited me from kissing boys," said Beat, "I'd kiss you."

There was another girl who had no such reservations, however. She approached Arthur as he strolled through the crowd, greeted by accolades from his friends.

"I love your ideas," said Cally Belnap. "You'll make a wonderful president."

"Thank you," was Arthur's glib response.

"You're not just smart," Cally flattered him. "You're good-looking, too. The glasses add a sophisticated touch."

"Uh, aren't you and Zeke going out?" asked Arthur, made uneasy by the cat girl's advance.

"Zeke? That prig?" She harrumphed. "He's afraid he'll go to hell if he kisses me."

Cally followed Arthur until the mob of cheering fans dispersed. They were in the playground, and morning recess had begun.

"Have you ever kissed a girl before?" she inquired of him.

"Yeah," he replied. "I like kissing girls."

"Then you'd make a much better boyfriend than Zeke."

Arthur fidgeted with his glasses. "Uh, can we talk about this when the election's over?"

"I elect you," said Cally, gazing affectionately at him. "It's over."

The boy had endured enough. "What's the matter with you Belnap triplets?" he exploded. "'Oh, you're such a cute boy! Kiss me! Kiss me!' Are you afraid your lips will dry up and blow away? Get a life already."

His criticism cut her to the heart, and she ran away in tears. "Yeesh," he grumbled.

The results of the exit poll were tabulated by afternoon, and were announced to all the students via the speaker system.

Arthur led Mickie with sixty-eight percent of the informal vote.

In Mrs. Krantz' room, Arthur's supporters cheered. "Huzzah for Arthur!" cried Beat. "We are unstoppable!"

"Don't be so sure," Muffy cautioned her. "Mickie may turn things around with her party."

"Not likely," Beat responded. "Unless she spikes the punch with a mind-control drug."

In her imagination, a large canopy had been erected next to Mickie's mansion, and the students underneath it were filling their paper cups from a row of punch bowls. Mickie climbed onto a raised platform, and held up her own drink. All eyes were transfixed on her.

"Come, my children," she called out to the multitude. "Follow me to a better world."

----

As soon as the final bell rang, Arthur threw on his pack and scurried from the room before his classmates could heap commendations on him.

He suspected he might be walking into a trap of some sort. Why had Mickie summoned him? Was she going to concede? Would she deploy a posse of bullies against him? He couldn't imagine her stooping to such tactics.

He looked down again at the sheet of paper that she had slipped into his hand earlier. On it was written, MEET ME IN THE GROVE OF TREES ON THE WEST END OF THE CAMPUS AFTER SCHOOL. COME ALONE.

There he was, in the midst of the trees, but Mickie was nowhere to be seen.

Then she appeared.

"Hello, Arthur."

The aardvark boy remained stoic and silent, waiting for the girl to state her purpose.

"You did well at the debate," she admitted. "I wasn't as prepared as I should have been."

Arthur shrugged.

"As you know, we Chanels like to host social events," Mickie went on. "We had a contract with a catering company in the downtown area, but they recently moved to another city. So my mom--she's the one who makes these decisions--has been looking for someone to take over the catering for our events."

"My dad's a caterer," Arthur told her.

"Obviously I know that," said Mickie, "or I wouldn't have brought up the subject. I also know that you're caring for your grandfather, that your mother's expecting a baby, and that your house is up for sale."

She paused a moment, allowing her meaning to sink into Arthur's head, and continued.

"Think about it. With the Chanels as a customer, your father's business would take off. You'd have enough money to take care of the new baby, and put your grandfather in a home. You wouldn't have to move away and say goodbye to all your friends."

"Uh, yeah, you're right," Arthur acknowledged.

"I have influence with my mom," Mickie boasted. "I helped her choose the other catering company. She trusts my judgment."

She took a step closer to Arthur.

"Drop out of the race," she said coldly, "and I'll recommend your father for the catering contract."

----

to be continued


	12. Dreams for Sale

"And I was like, duh," D.W. babbled. "And Arthur was like, duh. And we were both like, duh. And then my mom came in, and she was like, duh."

"Oh, D.W.," Nadine gushed. "You sound so mature when you talk like that."

The two girls were standing in front of the entrance to Mrs. Frensky's first-grade classroom, waiting for Arthur to arrive. He finally did, but his face showed unmistakable signs of inner turmoil.

"Here comes Mr. President now," D.W. joked. "What took you so long? I thought you'd been assassinated or something."

"Pretty close," Arthur moaned.

D.W. and Nadine asked the boy repeatedly what was troubling him, but he remained taciturn. They soon made it to the Read house, where Nadine would stay until her mother completed her shift at the jewelry store. Arthur looked glumly at the FOR SALE sign sticking up out of the yard, and imagined a similar sign hanging around his neck.

He wondered if the position of student body president was worth fighting for. He had entered the race on a whim, and had committed himself to victory out of spite toward Mickie and her "girlie man" posters. Yet now his family's future, and the only life he had ever known, were at stake. He had been foolish to think he could defeat someone as rich and clever as Mickie Chanel. Would she make such a bad president?

His mother found him sitting at his desk, gazing sadly at his homework. "Is something wrong?" she inquired.

Arthur only made an unhappy rumbling sound with his throat.

"You can tell me," said Mrs. Read, gently fondling the boy's shoulder.

"Mom," Arthur spoke up, "what would a catering contract with the Chanels be worth to us?"

His mother's eyes lit up. Her lips curled. For a moment Arthur expected her to say something along the lines of, "Ka-ching, ka-ching."

"A big difference, huh?"

"I'll say," said Mrs. Read. "We'd be able to keep the house, put Grandpa Dave in a retirement home..."

"What would you give up for it?"

Arthur's question took her by surprise. "What do you mean, what would I give up?"

Her son took a breath. "Suppose the Chanels walked in here and said, 'We'll hire your dad, but first you have to do us a favor.' Would you do it?"

"Hmm," Mrs. Read pondered. "What kind of favor are you talking about? You don't think they'd ask me to do something dishonest or illegal, do you?"

"No," said Arthur, "but they might ask you to give up something important to you, like one of your dreams."

"My dreams are not for sale," his mother said firmly. "Neither are yours."

She patted him on the head and left the room, humming a tune. Arthur could find no help in her advice, but to get more, he would have to admit the truth about his dilemma. Yet how could he look his family and friends in the eye, if they knew he had sold out?

An hour later his campaign manager, Beat Simon, showed up on the doorstep, wearing a smile as long as the Great Wall of China.

"You won the debate, but the election isn't over yet," she advised him. "Mickie Chanel is not to be misunderestimated. I've been talking with the students, and your idea of organizing the students into posses to discourage bullies struck a chord with them. I suggest you emphasize this issue in your speech."

"I'm not going to give a speech," said Arthur dolefully.

"I'm sorry?" Beat's eyes widened in surprise.

"You heard me," the boy grumbled. "You have rabbit ears."

"Yes, I heard you," said the British girl. "I think this is most unwise, Arthur. We can't afford to rest on our laurels. We must keep up the momentum of our campaign."

Arthur shook his head. "There's no more campaign. I'm dropping out."

"No!" Beat exclaimed. "We've come so far!"

Arthur launched into his well-rehearsed excuse. "I've decided the piano is more important to me."

Beat's aardvark jaw dropped.

"I'm going to expand my lessons with Dr. Fugue," Arthur lied. "He says I have potential to become a really great jazz pianist."

His story was met with an icy glare from Beat.

The girl's scowl turned into a condescending smile. "I think the stress is getting to you. I suggest you have a glass of warm milk and go to bed early."

"You can run in my place if you want," Arthur suggested. "I'll be your manager."

"Don't be absurd," said Beat, looking down at her chest. "If Mickie humiliated you by drawing you as a girl, heaven knows what she'll do to me."

----

Fearing that Beat's advice might actually change his mind, Arthur went to bed at the usual time without a glass of warm milk.

He dozed off quickly, and floated into a happy dream. His friends were surrounding him, applauding his victory in the student election. His parents were there, along with D.W. and Kate, and even Pal.

"I'm so proud of you, big brother," said D.W.

"I want to be just like you when I grow up," said Kate.

"I've got the best human in the whole wide world," said Pal.

Arthur and his legion of fans went to the Sugar Bowl together, where they enjoyed a sundae the size of a swimming pool. As he was shoving spoonfuls of ice cream into his mouth, he noticed that Mickie was approaching him with a sinister smile. Had she come to congratulate him?

The aardvark girl drew a bill from her pocket. "I'll give you one hundred dollars for your dream," she offered.

"Sure," said Arthur. How could the day get any better? Not only had he beaten Mickie in the election, but she had paid him an exorbitant amount for something he considered to be of little value.

As soon as the bill entered his hand, the scene changed. His family and friends were gone, as was the gigantic sundae. He was standing in the palacial reception room of the Chanel mansion, dressed in a humble suit, Mickie seated on an ornate golden throne before him.

"Go and fetch me a pint of ginger ale," she commanded.

Arthur didn't understand how he had materialized in this place, or what gave Mickie the impudence to order him around. He suddenly realized that while he had been pondering the oddness of his situation, he had marched into the kitchen, poured ginger ale into a silver goblet, and returned to the foot of Mickie's throne.

"What just happened?" he tried to ask, but the words that emerged from his mouth were, "Your pint, ma'am."

"Good work," said Mickie, taking a sip from the goblet. "Now sing a song for me. I want to be entertained."

"Go jump in the lake," Arthur wanted to say, but his mouth had already started singing, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands..."

"Excellent," Mickie praised him as he finished the song. "You're free to go."

Anxious to escape from the terrifying mansion and be reunited with those he cared for, Arthur ran through the gloomy corridors as fast as he could. However, his feet didn't carry him to the exit, but to the servant quarters. Upon entering, he came face to face with all of his friends and family members, dressed in rags and scowling miserably.

"Mickie owns your dream now," Buster explained to him. "You're a figment of her imagination. You have to do everything she says--everything she thinks."

"How could you sell it for so little?" Beat lamented.

"What did you do with the money?" D.W. inquired.

"I don't see the big deal," said Arthur flippantly. "It's just a dream. I'll have a new dream tomorrow night."

"No, you won't," said his mother. "I'm not trusting you with any more dreams after what you did with this one."

Arthur's eyes flew open, and he gasped for breath. What he had dreamed astonished him. Could Mickie really control him that easily?

He sank into slumber again, but had no more dreams for the rest of the night.

----

Something about the You Will Eat Here restaurant attracted customers from throughout Elwood City. Was it the ambience? The chicken pot pie? The hypnotic spiral on the storefront?

Prunella was making her acquaintance with the place for the first time, although she was sure she had visited before. The restaurant employed a 50's motif, with black-and-white portraits on the walls, and a jukebox in one corner. The tables were painted with a red and white spiral pattern.

"What'll it be, Prunie?" inquired Rubella from behind the counter.

"What do I normally have?" asked the bewildered girl.

The establishment was packed with students who had just finished their daily studies at the high school. The Breezy Listening station was piped in through the speakers, but wasn't loud enough for anyone to hear.

"You will have the chicken pot pie," said Rubella, peering into her sister's eyes.

"As you wish," droned Prunella as if in a trance.

"Coming right up." Rubella disappeared into the kitchen.

On her way to the back of the restaurant, Prunella passed by Binky and Sue, who were gazing into each other's empty eyes across a table.

"Duh, hi, Prunella," said Binky.

"Hey there," Sue added. "Sorry I didn't believe you when you said you were cured. Muffy cleared things up for me."

"Not a problem," said Prunella.

"We've got an opening in the cheerleading squad," Sue told her. "I think you'd make a good fit. You've got a nice pair of..."

"Don't listen to her," Francine warned Prunella. "She'll corrupt you." She and Arthur, who had been enjoying malts, gently took the rat girl by the arms and led her away.

"Of what?" Prunella asked no one in particular. "I've got a nice pair of what?"

Francine waited until she had seated Prunella next to her before explaining. "What Sue's trying to say is, you're a very attractive girl."

The compliment made Prunella blush.

"Did any boys look at you funny today?" asked Arthur.

"Uh, yeah, a few. Why?"

"Did your mom ever tell you where babies come from?" asked Francine.

"Yeah, once. A long time ago."

"The point we're trying to make is," Arthur counseled her, "now that you're a teenage girl, the boys will want to do more than just kiss you."

"They'll want to have sex with you," added Francine.

"Okay." Prunella nodded. "But what does that have to do with babies?"

Arthur and Francine exchanged amused glances.

"Sex is what makes girls have babies," said Arthur educationally.

"That's silly," said Prunella, shaking her head. "If that's true, then why don't they make pop songs about babies?"

"I never thought of that," Francine mused.

"Francine and I want to have babies," said Arthur, "but not until we're married."

"When will that be?"

"After we finish high school," replied Francine. "We've got it all planned out. Arthur becomes a famous jazz pianist, and I become a famous jazz drummer. We tour the world for a few years, then I start having babies and become a full-time mom."

"I thought you wanted to be a professional athlete."

"I did once," Francine recalled. "But I can't do that and have babies at the same time."

"I'm really glad you two are planning to get married," said Prunella, who then sighed plaintively. "I don't know how I'll ever get married. What boy would want to marry a girl who's forgotten five years of her life?"

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that an antlered youth had stepped up to the order counter. It was the same teen-aged George Nordgren that she had helped earlier in the day.

"Hmm..."

----

to be continued


	13. Party Politics

The next morning, Beat went to Arthur's house before the start of school, hoping to dissuade the boy from his purpose.

"I don't understand you," she said pleadingly. "Are you planning to spend all your free hours in front of the piano? Is Dr. Fugue really so demanding?"

"I've made up my mind," said Arthur, who was placing his foot on a chair to tie his shoe.

"And I'm trying to change it. Being student body president doesn't require that much..."

Arthur heard a creaking noise from the stairway leading down to the laundry room. "Quiet, Beat," he ordered. "My mom's coming."

"Why should I be quiet?" the rabbit-aardvark girl demanded. "Why shouldn't your mum be a part of..."

"Shut up!" Arthur barked.

"Don't argue, kids," said Mrs. Read, who had appeared with a basket of dried clothes.

Still determined, Beat followed Arthur along the street, urging him to reconsider.

"Maybe it's not just the piano," said the boy. "Maybe there are other things I'd like to do more than trying to improve the school."

"You're keeping something from me," Beat suspected. "You're in some kind of trouble, aren't you?"

She trailed him all the way to the principal's office, having no success.

"This is where we part ways, Beat," he told her. "It was nice having you as a campaign manager."

"Yes, it was," Beat admitted, "but don't ever ask me to do it again."

Once inside the office, Arthur closed the door on the consternated girl.

"Can I help you?" asked Mr. Haney, who was eating his usual breakfast of a bran muffin and a lollipop.

"Yes," Arthur replied. "I want to..."

He stopped upon noticing that something had changed on the principal's desk. In place of the framed portrait of his late wife, there was a different portrait--one of Zoe Belnap.

"Wow," he marveled. "You and Mrs. Belnap..."

"Yes, Arthur," Haney acknowledged. "We're dating now. We have so much in common."

While the principal extolled Zoe's virtues, Beat wandered toward her classroom, lamenting the effort she had wasted on the political campaign of a boy who had given up in midstream. As she rounded a corner, someone coming from the opposite direction nearly bowled her over.

"Pardon me," she said to the giraffe boy whose head was elevated about eight inches above her own, "but you've failed to notice that there's someone down here."

"Sorry," said Matt Blomdahl glibly.

Before he could walk away, Beat observed another curious thing about him. "Say, is that an MP3 player?"

"Yeah," replied Matt, glancing down at the device on his belt that pumped music into his ears. "I bought it last weekend."

"Fab," Beat remarked. "If I could afford one of those gadgets..."

All of a sudden, Beat knew what had happened to Arthur.

At that moment, the aardvark boy was still listening to Mr. Haney's gushing praise of Zoe Belnap.

"We share the same philosophy when it comes to education," he told Arthur. "Her family is a living example of it. Her daughters are perfectly well-behaved and remarkably intelligent. True, they think about boys too much, but that's..."

The door to the office flew open, and Beat stormed in, her face a mask of outrage. "Arthur Read, stop what you're doing this instant!" she commanded.

Startled, Arthur could think of no response.

"I know why you decided to quit," Beat claimed. "Mickie bought you out. She made you an offer you couldn't refuse."

"That's not true," Arthur insisted.

"I just ran into Matt Blomdahl, the boy who dropped out the same day he signed up," Beat went on. "Would you believe he bought himself a new MP3 player last weekend? Now where does a fifth-grader who can't even afford decent shoes get that kind of money?"

"Maybe he worked for it," said Arthur. "Or stole it."

"What did she offer you?" Beat demanded to know. "Money? Clothes? Fast food?"

"She didn't offer me anything."

Beat glowered at Arthur; by this time she had a four-inch height advantage over the boy. "You...are...lying," she snarled.

It was true, and Arthur knew it. Twenty-four hours earlier, he would never have dreamed of deceiving Beat Simon, who had once briefly been his girlfriend. Yet Mickie would dream of it; had he again become a puppet in her dream?

Shame filled his expression. "It's true," he confessed. "She offered to arrange a catering contract for my dad if I dropped out."

To his amazement, Beat started to laugh. She clutched her sides as if they would burst.

"You, sir, are the silliest goose I've ever known," she chided Arthur. "Mickie doesn't make those decisions for her family. She's eleven bloody years old."

Arthur could feel himself shrinking under Beat's derisive glare. He felt as if he was two inches tall, and feared she would step on him.

Mr. Haney looked back and forth at them. "Is there...anything I can do for you?" he inquired hesitantly.

"Uh, no," said the sheepish Arthur. "Our business here is finished."

----

A large canopy had been erected in the back yard of the Chanel mansion, to accommodate the guests at Mickie's campaign party. The entire school had been invited, so Mickie had instructed her servants to set up row after row of food trays. Deliverers from Chicken Licken and Dunkin Donuts had filled the trays with their wares. A huge banner had been draped over the front of the mansion, bearing the imaginative slogan MICKIE FOR PRESIDENT.

At 6 p.m. on Friday, the festivities began.

Hundreds of children, as well as many teachers and staff members, attended. Principal Haney was there, arm in arm with Zoe Belnap. Muffy busied herself handing out pro-Mickie pamphlets. Buster had come for the food, not the politics. Amy was by his side, and they had also managed to drag along George and Becky. Cally stood by her mother, having failed to secure a date, and feeling blue. Mickie's parents remained inside with Zeke, who felt uncomfortable in crowds.

Some of Arthur's supporters wandered past, attracted by the noise and smells, but unwilling to cross "party" lines.

"She spared no expense," Beat remarked. "I hope she makes a lot of new friends, because she'll gain nothing else by hosting this extravaganza."

"I'm not so sure," was Fern's response. "The election's only three days away. She can turn it around, unless Arthur has something planned for the weekend."

Underneath the canopy, Buster struck up a conversation with Muffy.

"I can eat all I want, and not have to vote for Mickie, right?" he inquired.

"Sure," Muffy replied, "as long as you leave some for everyone else."

She noticed that the rabbit boy was holding Amy's hand. "So, you two are an item?"

"Uh-huh," said Buster, nodding. "As soon as she accepted that I couldn't kiss her every second of every day, we got along fine."

"Oh, look," said Muffy with a wave. "There's George and Becky. Hi, George. Hi, Becky."

"Mmmf mmmf," said George, whose lips were planted firmly against Becky's.

Fern and Beat watched and sniffed for a minute or two, then continued down the sidewalk. Then Beat's powerful ears heard the sound of a vehicle coming to a stop. She turned, and saw an old covered truck that had just parked in front of the Chanel mansion.

The doors of the truck flew open, and four men burst out. They were dressed in grubby work clothes...and carried shotguns.

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Beat. Fern swiveled and gasped in horror.

The armed men had rough hands and faces. One was an anthro-Pomeranian, one was an anthro-bulldog, and the other two were rabbit people.

As the men rushed toward the Chanel house, Beat grabbed her cell phone. "I must call the police," she stated.

One of the rabbit men seemed to hear her, as he aimed his weapon in her direction and fired a shot...

----

to be continued


	14. Guys with Guns

The terrified girls heard a whizzing sound above their heads. The rabbit man who had fired at them waved his gun menacingly, as if to say that his next shot wouldn't be a warning shot. He then raced after his three comrades, who were nearing the canopy where the schoolchildren were assembled. Beat waited until she and Fern had run two blocks before attempting to call the police again.

Screams erupted throughout the multitude as the four armed men forced their way through. Kids with donuts and drumsticks in their hands dropped them out of fright. The bulldog man pointed his shotgun upward and fired, leaving a bullet hole in the canopy.

Alarmed by the sound of gunfire, Mr. and Mrs. Chanel emerged through the pine doors of the mansion. Their shocked eyes watched as the guests fled in all directions, knocking over tables and food trays in their attempt to escape the angry-looking intruders.

One of the rabbit men trained his sights on a group of kids that included Buster, Amy, and Muffy, none of whom dared move. The other rabbit man pointed his shotgun at Mr. Haney, Zoe, and Cally. The bulldog man held George, Becky, and several other children at bay. Most of the other children and adults fled down the street, shouting for the police. The scene was one of total chaos.

As the pom man stepped up to the front entrance and threatened Mickie and her parents with his weapon, Buster caught a glimpse of his face. It was Elbert England, Zeke's father.

"I want my boy back," the man demanded. "Hand him over." His arm muscles flexed as he held the shotgun steady.

"Mom, Dad, do something!" Mickie cried frantically.

"You can't have him," said the outraged Mrs. Chanel. "You're unfit to be his father. You belong in prison."

"I'll give you to the count of five before my friends start shooting," Mr. England growled.

Buster could sense his breath failing him as the armed, glowering rabbit man laid his finger over the trigger of his gun. Mr. Haney wrapped his arm around Zoe and pulled her closer.

"One. Two."

"I'll get him," said Mrs. Chanel in a tone of defeat.

She turned and entered the mansion, Mr. England following close behind with the barrel of his weapon trained at her back.

Seconds seemed to last hours as the hostages waited for deliverance or death. Zoe and the triplets, remarkably, showed no signs of fear.

Finally Mrs. Chanel emerged from the mansion entrance. Mr. England came out next, gripping his shotgun with one hand and Zeke's arm with the other. The pom boy's eyes were unfocused, his mouth gaping.

"There he is," said George to the armed bulldog man. "Will you let us go now?" The gunman only snarled at him.

Mr. England surveyed the scene of scattered food and frightened hostages. He tightened his grip on his son's arm. Mickie seemed on the verge of tears. Her parents stood motionlessly and helplessly.

"We'll take another kid, so the police won't follow us," the pom man declared.

Still dragging Zeke, he walked past Mickie without the slightest thought as to how valuable a hostage she might make. His eyes were fixed on a different child.

"You," he said, looking at Buster. "I remember you. Take him."

The fierce-looking rabbit man grabbed Buster's arm with his free hand, and started to pull the terrified boy after him.

"No!" shrieked Amy. "Let him go!"

"Take 'em out, girls," said Zoe calmly.

What happened next astonished and bewildered everyone present.

Her movements like lightning, Zoe Belnap used one hand to shove aside the barrel of her captor's shotgun, and launched the other into his midsection. The powerful blow sent the rabbit man and his weapon flying ten feet. As he landed on his back, the wind flew out of his lungs with a groan.

Mr. Haney couldn't believe what he had witnessed, but the show wasn't over yet. Amy leaped into the air, seemed to levitate several feet above the ground, and landed a strong kick in the face of the rabbit man who had seized Buster. He dropped his shotgun and fell backwards onto the grass, unconscious.

Becky hopped, fell sideways, landed on one hand, and swiveled her legs about, forcefully striking the bulldog man's legs from the back. The man's shotgun went off as he fell, sending a bullet crashing against the wall of the mansion. The cat girl snatched the weapon from his hand, and carefully aimed it downward at his head.

Mr. England, seeing that his companions had been felled, ran directly toward the covered truck on the street, dragging Zeke behind him. His son put up no resistance. The pom man only made it halfway, as Zoe picked up a food tray, emptied it of chicken, and hurled it at him. The spinning metal tray collided with his back, and he cried out in pain as he toppled forward, pulling Zeke down with him.

Buster sputtered in astonishment. "Holy... Wh-what's going on?"

Amy grabbed his hand. "Come on," she urged him.

The cat girl led the rabbit boy away from the mansion at top speed. Before Buster knew where she was taking him, they had arrived inside the Tibble house.

"Y-you're not human," Buster stammered as Amy searched through a chest of drawers. "You're a robot, or something."

"I'm an alien," the girl admitted. She soon located a small object in one of the drawers; it resembled a handheld electronic device, with strange characters engraved in its surface.

"Are you a good alien or a bad alien?" Buster asked.

"Good alien," replied Amy as she fidgeted with the controls on the device. "But the Earth people don't understand that. Now that our secret's out, they'll try to capture us and perform experiments on us."

"Cool," marveled Buster. "My girlfriend's an alien."

Suddenly a shrill whining sound filled the room. Buster was amazed to see a tall shaft of glowing light before him. It was rectangular in shape, and the electromagnetic force surging from it made his ears stand on end. Amy rested the handheld device on a table, pointing its transparent end in the direction of the light.

"What is it?" inquired the rabbit boy.

"It's a gateway leading to my planet," Amy answered. "My mother and sisters will be here soon, and then we'll go home together."

"Cool," said Buster dreamily.

"We have another minute or two," said Amy, stroking the boy's cheek. "Would you like to take a quick look at my planet?"

The prospect thrilled Buster beyond words. He had met an alien before, but this was his first opportunity to set foot on another planet.

Yet what if there was danger involved?

"Will it hurt?" Buster asked nervously.

"Not a bit," Amy assured him.

"Will I spin around and around? Will I get sick and barf?"

Amy was growing impatient. "No. It's easy. It's like walking through a door."

The gateway crackled and pulsated, amplifying Buster's anxiety. "Uh...I don't know..."

"Please, Buster," Amy begged. "I don't know if I'll ever see you again."

"Well, if you put it that way..." said Buster, his courage rising.

"You go first," said Amy.

The rabbit boy took a small step toward the gateway, then a larger step. The electricity made his ears feel funny. He took several more steps, until his nose was inches from the portal.

Just as he was about to make the leap into the unknown, a woman's angry voice sounded. "Buster! Stop!"

Zoe Belnap had burst into the room, Becky and Cally close behind. The cat woman's face radiated fury.

Confused, Buster turned around to face Amy, only to find that the girl's mouth had twisted into a devilish grin. "You're mine," she hissed.

Grabbing the electronic device from the table, she pounced on Buster with catlike speed and agility. The two tumbled through the gateway and vanished, along with the device.

As Zoe and her other two daughters watched in abject horror, the portal itself faded and disappeared.

They were looking at each other in desperation, as if not knowing what to do, when Mr. Haney, Muffy, and George arrived. "Something wrong, Zoe?" the principal asked.

The cat woman only stared at him with sad, hopeless eyes.

"H-how...how did you..." he stuttered, gesturing in the general direction of the Chanel mansion.

Zoe had no chance to answer, as yet another incredible event transpired before their astonished eyes.

Six portals, similar in size and appearance to the portal that had disappeared, formed all around the room. Muffy raised an arm to shield her eyes from the intense light. George thought he felt electric currents coursing through his antlers. They, Mr. Haney, and the Belnaps were completely surrounded by glowing gateways.

An instant later, six uniformed, human-like figures stepped out of the portals. Each had legs and feet roughly the same size as those of humans, although their arms were unusually long. Their heads were concealed within crystalline spheres. They all lifted their hands and pointed metallic, wand-shaped devices at Zoe, Becky, and Cally, who recoiled fearfully.

"You are under arrest," uttered one of the beings in a rumbling voice. "Resistance is useless."

----

to be continued


	15. Illegal Aliens

"Who are they?" Muffy asked Mr. Haney, as if she expected the principal to know everything.

"They're aliens, duh," George pointed out the obvious.

From the wands of the six sphere-headed beings emerged bolts of white light that encompassed the Belnaps, forming into a transparent four-walled structure. Their eyes like those of newly caged animals, Zoe, Becky, and Cally pressed their hands firmly against the glass-like walls, trying but failing to break through them. The aliens lowered their wands as the imprisoned Belnaps glared fiercely at them.

"Er...Greetings from Earth," said Mr. Haney sheepishly. "Live long and prosper."

One of the uniformed aliens turned to him and seemed to face him, although its round, opaque head showed no variegating features. "How did you know our traditional greeting?" it inquired.

"Uh, would you mind telling us what's happening here?" Muffy demanded.

Another of the wand-wielding aliens spoke. "We will explain everything, if you promise to never reveal it to another Earth creature."

"I promise," said Muffy.

"Scout's honor," said George.

"You have my word," said Mr. Haney.

"Very well." The alien seemed to speak without taking breaths. "The females you know as Zoe, Amy, Becky, and Cally Belnap come from a planet called Yordil. Eight Earth years ago, Yordilian scientists created a viral weapon which was accidentally released into the atmosphere. The virus had no effect on females, but was lethal to males. Within days all men, boys, and male embryos on the planet were dead."

"How horrible!" exclaimed Muffy.

"So that's why they like boys so much," George realized.

"You're talking about extinction," Mr. Haney remarked.

"Exactly," the alien continued. "Many males from other planets have offered to settle on Yordil and assist in the propagation of the species, but most of them are degenerates in search of pleasure. To defend their dignity, the Yordilians carefully screen all visiting males and allow only a select few to live among them. As you can imagine, this leads to fierce competition for husbands. Many Yordilian women, seeing no hope for male companionship if they remain on their planet, choose to settle on other worlds--sometimes legally, sometimes illegally."

"You mean Zoe and the girls are...illegal aliens?" Mr. Haney marveled.

"Correct. By the terms of the Alliance treaty with Yordil, we are forbidden to interfere in its internal affairs, but we can arrest and prosecute Yordilians who attempt to emigrate illegally. Zoe was a rich woman on Yordil, which allowed her to buy many expensive Earth items with cash. If the Alliance police were at full force, we could have arrested her within hours of her arrival on Earth, or even before. However, the destruction wrought by Dark Augusta has severely weakened us. We only became aware of Zoe's presence here when Amy activated the interplanetary gateway."

Dumbfounded, Mr. Haney walked up to the transparent prison and rested his hands against it, facing Zoe directly. "Is all of this true?" he inquired.

"Yes, Herbert," was Zoe's bitter reply. "I'm sorry things didn't work out between us."

"What happened to Amy?" George asked.

"She fled through the gateway to Yordil, with the Earth boy," the sphere-headed alien answered.

"The Earth boy? You mean Buster?"

"The one with the ears, yes."

"Buster always wanted to visit another planet," Muffy remarked.

"How do we get him back?" George wanted to know.

"That may be difficult," said the alien. "If the Yordilians like him, they may decide to keep him, and the treaty with Yordil forbids us to retrieve him by force."

Muffy's voice started to break. "Omigosh...poor Buster...trapped forever on a planet of girls. What are we supposed to tell his friends?"

"You will tell them nothing, as you promised."

George and Muffy exchanged looks, as if asking each other how it would be possible to keep such a secret.

"We will do all within our power to bring him back," the alien vowed. "In the meantime...live long and prosper."

The glassy cage holding Zoe, Becky, and Cally faded away, taking the Belnaps with it. The sphere-headed aliens turned and stepped through the portals, which then dissolved and vanished. Only Muffy, George, and Mr. Haney were left in the room.

The glum-faced principal turned and addressed George. "Well, George, it looks like we've both lost a girlfriend. What do you say we go to the Sugar Bowl and drown our sorrows in an ice cream soda?"

"I'm never too sad for ice cream," said the moose boy.

Muffy jumped in front of them as they were leaving the Tibble house. "Have you guys forgotten about Buster?" she said indignantly. "What if...what if he never comes back?"

"All we can do is hope for the best," said Mr. Haney.

----

George sat alone at a table in You Will Eat Here, drinking an ice cream soda through a straw, drowning his sorrows. Teenage Muffy, holding a tray with a fish burger and French fries, elected to take the seat across from him. "Hi, George."

"Hi, Muffy."

"Did you hear that Prunella's cured?"

"Yeah, I heard," said George emotionlessly.

Muffy dipped a French fry in ketchup, and tossed it into her mouth.

"Did you tell her about Buster?" George asked her.

"Yes," Muffy answered. "But I didn't tell her the truth."

----

Elbert England and his three accomplices were arrested and jailed for having stormed the Chanel mansion with firearms. Many of the children had been seriously shaken, including Zeke, but no casualties had occurred. Buster Baxter was unaccounted for, as were Zoe Belnap and her daughters Amy, Becky, and Cally.

In spite of the disappearance of her son, Bitzi Baxter spent Friday evening writing a detailed article about the event for the Elwood Times. She spent Saturday morning in the police station, trying to aid the officers in their search for the lost rabbit boy. Everyone else in the neighborhood passed the morning glued to the TV and newspaper reports of the shocking incident.

Mel Cooper straightened his tie. He didn't need to do so, as his only purpose in going to the office was to catch up on his casework, but dressing well had become a compulsion with him. His son Logan was mowing the back lawn, while his daughter Odette was ironing her dresses.

The front door opened. The visitor hadn't bothered to knock.

"Mom?" said Odette in surprise.

Valerie Cooper was in the house, and her expression was one of meekness and shame. Odette put down the steam iron. A small hope entered her heart that her mother had come to apologize for, and accept blame for, the bitterness that had threatened to split their family.

"I must talk to your father," Mrs. Cooper addressed her swan-necked daughter.

"I'm right here," said her husband with supreme confidence. He stepped out of the bathroom to greet her.

"I think you know why I've come," said Mrs. Cooper.

WIthout another word, the estranged duck couple retired to the bedroom for a heart-to-heart. Mr. Cooper waited for his wife to speak the first word.

"I've decided not to divorce you," she informed him. "I'm not saying I'll come back right away."

"I understand, Valerie," said Mr. Cooper, straining to suppress a smirk.

"I see now that I misjudged Elbert England," his wife admitted. "I see him for the terrible man he is. I used to think you were cruel to take his son away from him, but I'm not so sure of that anymore."

The duck man remained silent, waiting for more.

"I think it was a bad influence that made me say some of the things I said to you," Mrs. Cooper went on. "Even those of us who think we're following the right path can be tempted by darkness. I think that's how Mr. England got where he is." Tears started to drip from her eyes. "There's so much difference between how you believe and how I believe. It may be hard, or even impossible, to bring them together, but I want to try."

"So do I," said Mr. Cooper, and he kissed his wife on the cheek.

----

Among the people glued to the TV reports of the Chanel mansion incident was Alan Powers. More accurately, he was glued to his house, as his parents had placed severe restrictions on how often and in what manner he could leave. He was starting to understand how Tegan had felt during her visit, shackled with a monitor bracelet, under virtual house arrest. It seemed a vast conspiracy was working against him...or for him. He no longer knew who to trust.

The news of Buster's disappearance hadn't affected him much. Muffy, Prunella, Fern, Tegan, and Beat had all vanished for brief periods since the beginning of the year, and all had come back unharmed. Was he becoming desensitized to bizarre occurrences?

Bored with TV's offerings, he lay down on the couch and dozed off. He was in this state when his mother called to him. "Alan, you have a phone call."

He yawned and pushed himself up. Mrs. Powers handed him the receiver. "Hello?"

"Alan? This is Tegan."

He nearly flew off the couch and through the ceiling.

"Don't tell anyone about this call." It was unmistakably her voice. "Meet me at 8 p.m. on Monday in front of the public library on 18th and Harvard. Bring Prunella. No one else." The line went dead.

Thoughts careened through Alan's head. Tegan was free. She wanted to see him. Had their parents been trying to keep them apart? What interest did Tegan have in Prunella?

The answer to the last question hit him like a ten-ton weight on steroids. He had been a fool not to think of it.

Tegan had the power to cure Prunella's memory problem.

----

to be continued


	16. The New President

Other than some new furniture and plants, and a slight amount of remodeling, Arthur's house had changed very little. They still watched the same old TV set. Arthur now had three younger siblings--eleven-year-old D.W., seven-year-old Kate, and four-year-old Richard.

"Dad's still running his catering service," Arthur related. "Mom got a job with a tax firm."

He and Francine were seated together, holding hands. D.W., Kate, and Richard were also in the living room. All were pleased at the news that Prunella had recovered from her debilitating memory disorder, and had gathered to inform her of the happenings of the past five years.

"I'm in sixth grade," D.W. boasted. "That's the grade you were in when the bus hit you. When you go back to school, maybe you'll be in my class."

"I remember your family was planning to move once," said Prunella.

"We were," said Arthur. "After Richard was born, there was hardly enough room in the house to turn your head. But Dad got some new customers, and made enough money to put Grandpa Dave in a retirement home."

"How is the old man?" Prunella inquired.

Arthur solemnly lowered his eyes. "He died last year."

"I'm sorry," said Prunella sympathetically.

"We were all very sad," D.W. recalled. "But at least his suffering's over. He was totally helpless. He didn't recognize any of us."

"But we still have Grandma Thora," Richard exulted. "Grandma Thora! Grandma Thora!"

The boy's shouting attracted two little yellow dogs into the room. They strolled up to Prunella's legs and started to sniff.

"I know this person," said the male dog. "I can't quite place the scent."

"I've never smelled her before in my life," said the female dog. "She'll have to earn my trust by feeding me."

"Oh, how cute," gushed Prunella, reaching down to pet the two dogs. "Is one of them Pal?"

"One's Pal," D.W. told her, "and the other's Amazon Puppy. She came to live with us after Buster disappeared."

"He was abducted by aliens," Kate chimed in.

A while later Kate and Richard left the room, and the conversation took a more serious turn.

"I asked you during lunch why you blamed Alan for your accident," said Francine, "and you said it was a long story. We've got time. Would you like to tell it?"

Prunella only scowled bitterly.

"He's so sad and lonely all the time," D.W. remarked. "Ever since your accident, it's like a dark cloud has been following him around."

"You have your life back now," Arthur urged the rat girl. "Can't you forgive him?"

"I guess I should," Prunella acknowledged. "He's had five years to feel sorry for what he did."

"What exactly did he do?" Francine inquired.

Prunella took a deep, sad breath. "Just before the Dark Augusta incident, Alan and I got our hands on a body-switching device. He thought the world was about to end, so he wanted to switch bodies with me just for the heck of it. I was curious too, so I went along with it. While I was walking around in his body, he ran into the street in my body, and got hit by a bus."

"Weird," Francine mused. "So the accident happened to him, not you."

"But you were stuck with the consequences," Arthur added.

"That wasn't the end of it," Prunella continued. "Alan was in the hospital with amnesia. He forgot he was really Alan, and thought he was me, because he was in my body. As soon as he remembered who he was, he switched us back, even though Beat warned us that the device might be harmful if used on someone with a brain injury."

"You think that's what damaged your memory?" said Francine.

"I don't know." Prunella looked at her feet. "But he should have waited. I didn't mind being in his body. I guess he was afraid he'd be stuck as a girl with brain damage."

"He shouldn't have switched with you in the first place," said Arthur. "But I can understand why he did. With power like that comes great temptation."

"You're right," Prunella agreed. "We were little kids. We didn't know what we were getting into."

"I think you should go to him," said D.W. "You don't have to forgive him, but at least let him know you're cured. Maybe that will make him happy."

After a moment of deep consideration, Prunella declared, "I will."

----

Mrs. Krantz' class had shrunk considerably over the weekend. Buster and the Belnap triplets were nowhere to be found. The kids found it difficult to think about their missing friends and the imminent student election at the same time.

"Maybe Buster was carried off by a fifth gunman," Arthur theorized.

"There were only four," Muffy insisted. "Buster left the scene with Amy. We followed them to the Tibble house, and then they were gone."

Van noticed that Zeke appeared distracted and gloomy. "Cheer up, pal," he encouraged the pom boy. "Nobody blames you for what your father did."

"Now I'll never go home," Zeke mumbled hopelessly.

"As long as you're with us, you're home," Van assured him. "And here's some good news that should make you happy. My parents aren't getting divorced after all."

"That's good," said Zeke with a weak smile.

Mrs. Krantz stood up and began to speak. "I'm glad you could all make it today. Sadly, a few of us have gone missing, but I have confidence they'll be found. Let's have a moment of silence for our absent friends Amy, Becky, Cally, and Buster."

The class fell silent, and the kids mused fondly upon their memories of Buster. George thought about how much he missed Becky's kisses.

"Thank you," Mrs. Krantz resumed. "Don't forget to vote in the student election today. Remember, the polls close at lunchtime."

A row of voting booths had been set up in the gymnasium, and the students flocked to the spot immediately after first period. Long lines formed as the kids made their choice between Arthur Read and Mickie Chanel.

Arthur, confident of success, lounged about in the center court during morning recess. The area was unusually empty, due to the high voting activity. Mickie Chanel walked up to him, looking a bit harried.

"So you decided to reject my offer," she said with a mixture of sternness and uncertainty. "You realize your family will move away because of this."

"Whether my family moves away isn't up to you, Mickie," said the aardvark boy indifferently. "Now go crawl back in your hole."

Reaching into the purse she was carrying, Mickie drew out a clump of bills. "One hundred dollars, Arthur," she offered. "All you have to do is concede."

"You and your one hundred dollars can go to..."

"Three hundred!" Mickie pleaded. "You could buy an iPod with that much."

"One thousand," said Arthur flatly.

It seemed to him that a battle was raging within Mickie's heart, between her fear of failure and her stinginess.

"All right," she finally spoke, her voice quivering. "One thousand dollars is yours if you concede the race."

"No," said Arthur.

"I'm not going any higher, you greedy swine!" Mickie snapped.

Arthur merely looked away and snickered. Mickie slowly came to realize that several students had gathered nearby, and were listening to their exchange.

"I've got a better idea," one of them said to her. "Give each of us one thousand dollars, and we won't tell the principal about your bribery."

Utterly defeated, Mickie let loose with an angry growl, and stormed away.

----

At the end of the school day, the results of the voting were reported over the speaker system by Principal Haney.

"Lakewood Elementary's first student body president is...Arthur Read!"

All the kids in Arthur's class cheered, except for Muffy, who shrugged and sighed with resignation.

"The final results: Arthur Read 61, Mickie Chanel 39," the principal continued. "Class dismissed."

The air was filled with jubilation as Arthur's friends raised him above the ground with their hands, and ported him all the way to the Sugar Bowl for a victory party.

Mickie, her scowl black as night, returned to the Chanel mansion and trudged up the spiral stairway to her room. It didn't take her mother long to know what had happened.

"Sorry about the election, dear," said Mrs. Chanel, resting a hand on her daughter's back.

"Curse that Arthur," grumbled Mickie, who lay on her stomach. "He wouldn't take a hundred. He wouldn't take a thousand. What did he expect me to do, cut off my hand and gift-wrap it for him?"

"There, there," her mother tried to comfort her. "There's always next year."

"Next year I'll be in middle school," Mickie pointed out.

Mrs. Chanel could come up with no salve for her daughter's bitterness, other than sitting down next to her and stroking her back. Then a thought struck her.

"Is it true that Arthur's father is a caterer?"

Mickie groaned.

----

to be continued


	17. In or Out?

Dusk had arrived. Alan waited until his mother was occupied in another room, then quietly opened the front door and slipped out. He had escaped undetected.

Down the street he strolled nonchalantly, hoping no one would find it suspicious that he was unaccompanied. As far as he knew, his parents' overprotectiveness had not yet become common knowledge.

Upon arriving at the Prufrock house, he rang the doorbell. "Come in, Alan," Rubella welcomed him.

"I need to talk to Prunella," he said earnestly.

"She's in the living room."

Alan found the rat girl in front of the TV, with the mindless stare of someone who had lost the will to live. "Prunella," he called to her.

She turned her head and scowled darkly.

"Can we go to your room?" Alan requested. "I have something to talk to you about. It's important."

"It better be," Prunella grumbled.

Once they were inside the bedroom on the upper floor, Alan made his case. "Tegan wants to meet with us. I think she knows a way to cure you."

"Really?" said Prunella expectantly. "When?"

"Now."

Prunella glanced around uneasily. "Uh, that's a little soon. I'll have to ask Rubella to drive me."

"We're not driving," Alan told her. "We're taking the bus. And we're going alone."

"Alone? But it's getting late."

"All the more reason for us to leave right away."

Within moments Prunella had put on her jacket and joined Alan at the door. "I'm going to Alan's for just a second," she informed Rubella.

"Be careful," Rubella cautioned her.

They started down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. "This is dangerous," Prunella protested mildly.

"Life is dangerous," was Alan's response.

----

Teenage Prunella stood on the doorstep at Alan's house, wishing she were anywhere else. How could she face, let alone forgive, the boy who had wrecked her life?

The door was opened by a young bear man wearing reading glasses. His cheeks were covered with peach fuzz, and the sloppiness of his hair and clothes suggested that he didn't get out much. Prunella saw anguish in his eyes as he looked upon her.

"May I come in?" she asked politely.

Alan didn't speak, but stepped aside to allow Prunella entrance. The inside of the house was for the most part how she remembered it.

"Why have you come?" Alan inquired, his tone devoid of happiness.

The boy was so miserable, Prunella felt compelled to say anything that might brighten his day.

"Alan...I'm cured."

She could almost hear the weight falling from Alan's shoulders and landing on the floor.

"Cured? How?"

"Augusta did it. She gave me a stone, I put it under my pillow, and the next morning I could remember stuff."

Seemingly too embarrassed to look Prunella in the face, Alan turned aside. She saw a tear roll down his cheek.

----

Alan and Prunella disembarked the bus near the intersection of 18th and Harvard, near downtown Elwood City. The library was three blocks away, and they walked the distance quickly. Alan checked his watch. It was five minutes to eight.

"This is where we're supposed to meet her," he told Prunella. The library was closed. The only light was from the lamp posts surrounding it. Night was creeping across the sky.

"What a lovely evening," Prunella commented. "I hope what you're saying is true. I hope I won't forget this day."

Alan didn't speak, but only watched and listened. He hoped with all his heart that he hadn't raised the girl's hopes for nothing.

It was eight o'clock. A soft voice called out from behind the library building. "Psst. Alan. Prunella."

It was Tegan's voice, but Alan didn't see her face. He grabbed Prunella's hand, and led her to the semi-darkened alley behind the building.

"It looks scary," said Prunella fearfully. "What if it's a trap?"

They took a few steps into the alley, and Tegan's outline became visible. "Hello, Alan," she welcomed him. She wore the neuroblocker barette on her head.

"Hi, Tegan," Alan returned the greeting.

They were a few feet from the smiling girl when Alan felt a hand gripping his shoulder. He gasped and twirled. A short cat man had surprised them from behind.

Mansch. He might have known.

----

Alan struggled to contain his emotions as Prunella cradled him in her long, lanky arms. They were leaning against the back of the couch.

"I was afraid you'd be like that forever," Alan sobbed. "I'm so glad you have your life back. I'm sorry for what I did to you, Prunella. I'm so sorry."

"I forgive you," said the rat girl gently. "Now that I have my life back, you can have yours back too."

"Oh, thank you." Alan tightened his grip on Prunella's back. "Thank you for forgiving me."

They embraced long and hard. After Alan had released her, Prunella carefully pulled off his reading glasses and wiped the tears from them with a handkerchief.

"When I first asked Augusta to help you, I wasn't sure if she could pull it off," Alan related with a sniffle. "I was desperate. I would have done anything to make things right. And I almost did."

----

Alan recoiled in terror from the goateed face of Raymond Mansch. Prunella, never having met the cat man before, could only gape in confusion.

"I'm not here to hurt you, Alan," said the expert thief. "I'm here to help you."

"Why should I trust you?" Alan snapped. "You're a crook. You kidnapped Fern."

"You're not exactly an angel yourself, young man," Mansch chided him. "You erased Tegan's memories of her time with you."

Shame welled up in Alan's heart. He still regretted what he had done, but his parents had insisted it was necessary.

"Listen to him, Alan," Tegan urged him. The sound of a cat screeching echoed through the alley.

"Whatever crimes I may have committed," said Mansch, "they pale in comparison to what the government is doing to the Brainchildren--separating them from their families, locking them away from the rest of the world, preventing them from using their gifts. Yes, Alan. My friends and I broke into Ballford Prep and freed them."

The news startled but didn't surprise Alan. "Why didn't my parents tell me this?" he wanted to know.

"You're a Brainchild too," Mansch went on. "The only reason your parents haven't locked you up is because your powers only work when you're with Tegan. They want to keep the two of you apart at any cost."

Alan's mind became restless. What if Mansch was speaking the truth? What if his own parents were misleading him?

"Besides Tegan, there are three other Brainchildren with me," Mansch told him. "Your old friend C.V., and a boy and girl whose powers you'll have to see to believe. They're all very grateful to me for springing them from that prison of a school."

"I think you're just interested in power," Alan accused him.

"No, Alan," Tegan claimed. "I've been in his mind. He only wants to protect us until we can protect ourselves."

"Excuse me," Prunella chimed in, "but what do I have to do with any of this?"

"That's the best part," Tegan replied. "Mansch helped me relearn my new powers after Alan erased my memories. I can use them to cure you. I can absorb your memories of the day when you go to bed, and put them back in your head when you wake up."

Prunella gaped in amazement and turned to Alan, as if seeking a verification from him that it was possible.

"There's a catch, isn't there?" said Alan suspiciously.

"Of course there is," Mansch acknowledged. "Can you guess?"

Alan's body shuddered. Dark sentiments filled his heart. He knew what the catch was.

"You want me to join you."

----

"It was the hardest decision I ever made," teenage Alan recalled. "But in the end, I knew I had to choose my parents over a known criminal."

"Did you ever see Tegan again?" Prunella asked.

"No." Alan shook his head.

"Still, you made the right choice," Prunella assured him.

She leaned forward to embrace him again, but as her arms touched his shoulders, the boy and girl blinked out of existence.

----

"Join me, Alan," Mansch urged the boy. "It's the only way to help Prunella. It's the only way to be with your sister."

Alan's mind raced. He didn't want to turn his back on his parents, yet Prunella was staring him in the face, as if pleading with him to make the decision that would allow her to live a normal life again.

"Well?" said Mansch impatiently. "Are you in or out?"

Alan gritted his teeth. He put forth his hand, and Mansch eagerly shook it.

"I'm in."

----

to be continued


	18. Breakfast at Bernie's

Within minutes, Alan and Prunella had belted themselves into the back seat of Mansch's Mercedes, and the cat man drove away into the evening. Tegan frequently looked back and smiled at the two sixth-graders from the passenger seat.

"I should call my parents and let them know where I am," Alan suggested, apparently unsure of his decision to accompany Mansch.

"Why would you want to do that?" the man asked facetiously.

"You're right," Alan realized. "That doesn't make a lot of sense."

"I'll call them for you," Tegan offered, and Mansch unfastened his cell phone and passed it to her.

At Alan's house, Mrs. Powers was phoning the neighbors, trying to find out where her son had gone. "He and Prunella left here a while ago," Rubella told her. "They said they were going to your place. I don't know where else they could be."

"Hold on," said Mrs. Powers when she heard some clicks. "I'm getting another call."

She punched the receiver button, and heard a voice that startled her. "Mom, this is Tegan."

Mrs. Powers motioned urgently to her husband, who was sitting nearby. Taking the hint, he grabbed his portable phone from an end table and dialed the police.

"She's probably getting the police on the line right now," Tegan remarked to Mansch while covering the cell phone with her palm. "But by the time they trace the call, we'll be long gone."

"Er, hello, Tegan," came her mother's voice. "Would you mind telling me where you are? I know you're not at the school."

"That's right," the bear girl replied. "And I'm not going back."

"Be reasonable," her mother pleaded.

"Alan and Prunella are with me," Tegan went on. "If you want to see them again, you'll grant me my freedom."

The connection went dead, leaving Mrs. Powers to deliberate on the shocking turn of events.

She switched back to the previous conversation with Rubella and said, "Tell your mother we need to talk."

----

A frightened, piercing scream awoke Tegan. She opened her eyes to behold Prunella sitting up next to her in the queen-sized bed, still wearing her dress from the previous day, glancing around the unfamiliar room.

"Where am I?" she cried out. It was almost eight in the morning, and the room was lighted. The last thing she remembered was bedding down after a long day of saving the universe.

"Calm down," said Tegan gently.

Prunella vaguely recognized the girl lying beside her, but didn't know at all the orange-haired rabbit girl on the other end of the bed. Then Tegan adjusted her barette, and memories of the previous day started to pour in.

It took only a minute. "I...remember," Prunella marveled. "I have some kind of memory problem, and I keep forgetting days. But you fixed it."

Tegan nodded warmly.

"I remember this room," said the rat girl, looking around at the contemporary furniture and the drawn blinds on the windows. To the rabbit girl she added, "I remember you. Your name's Claire, and you can move things with your brain."

"Very good, Prunella," said Claire with a proud grin and a slight French accent.

"I've got to tell Alan," exclaimed Prunella, leaping out of the bed.

She found the boys in another room of the house in which she had spent the night. There were three asleep together--Alan, his old classmate C.V., and a poodle boy with fluffy white hair.

"Alan!" she said loudly. "It worked! I remember everything that happened yesterday!"

"Not so loud," grumbled the poodle boy, clutching his ears.

To Alan, it seemed he was waking up to another dream, a joyous one. "That's great," he said cheerfully but quietly. "Now you can have a normal life--well, besides being a criminal."

"What's my name?" the fluffy-haired boy asked Prunella.

"Victor," the rat girl answered confidently. "You have super-sensitive senses, which is why I have to talk very softly around you."

"Someone's fixing bacon," said Victor eagerly as he crawled down from the bed.

"Even I can smell that," said Prunella mockingly.

"I didn't smell it," said Victor. "I heard it."

While C.V. was feeling for his spectacles, the drowsy-eyed Claire stepped into the room and stared at the pair of glasses on the nightstand, causing them to rise into the air and float onto the owl boy's face. "Merci beaucoups," he thanked the French girl.

The house was modest-sized but expensively furnished. Unlike the children, Raymond Mansch had already bathed and dressed himself. "Good morning, children," he greeted them from the kitchen. "Breakfast will be ready in a minute."

Alan, Prunella, Tegan, C.V., Claire, and Victor followed his voice and saw a strange man bent over the stove. "Hello," he said in a squeaky voice while flipping eggs with a spatula. "I'm one of Ray's business associates. You can call me Bernie." The tall, muscular aardvark man had a scar that ran down the right side of his face.

"Uh, it's nice to meet you," said Alan nervously. "I'm Alan Powers, and this is Prunella Prufrock."

The man didn't reach out to shake hands, but focused on his cooking. "I've met your friend Fern," he said through the corner of his mouth. "Nice girl. Very quiet."

A chill ran down Alan's back when he realized the meaning of Bernie's glib remark.

"So what kind of super powers do you have?" asked the aardvark man, turning to face Prunella.

"I, uh, don't have any," said Prunella with a shrug. "I'm only here to take advantage of Tegan's super powers."

Bernie fixed his gaze on Alan. "And what about you?"

Alan lowered his eyes, unsure if he should tell the stranger. "Don't be bashful," Mansch goaded him.

"He only has powers when he's with me," Tegan informed Bernie. "I can put memories in your head, but he can take them out."

"So you can make people forget things," said Bernie, looking thoughtfully at Alan. "What good is that?"

"I don't really know," Alan replied. "I just found out a few weeks ago that I had powers. I haven't done much with them."

"We haven't tried it yet," Tegan added, "but I believe that between the two of us, we can make people switch bodies."

Bernie pursed his lips fearfully.

As the aardvark man loaded some plates with eggs and bacon, Alan gestured for Prunella and Tegan to join him in one of the bedrooms. Once inside, he closed the door and spoke to the girls in a solemn tone.

"Bernie's one of the men who kidnapped Fern," he stated.

"Are you sure?" asked the startled Prunella.

"Yes. How else would he know her?"

"You're right, he is," Tegan admitted. "But he never wanted to hurt her, and he doesn't want to hurt us."

"There you go again," Alan chided her. "Always siding with the criminals."

"I merged with him, Alan," Tegan defended herself. "I know what kind of man he is."

"What kind of man is he?"

"He has some very good qualities," said Tegan in a belittling tone. "You can't see them, but I can."

Alan shook his head in frustration. "This was a bad idea," he told Prunella. "There must be another way."

"I'm not going back to the school," Tegan insisted.

"I have an idea," Prunella interjected. "Why don't you switch bodies?"

Alan and Tegan stared blankly at her.

"It's perfect." To Tegan she said, "You don't have to go back to the school because you're in Alan's body." To Alan she added, "You can fix my memory problem because you're in Tegan's body. And I don't have to run away from home and live with crooks."

"I don't know if we can do that," said Alan. "To other people, maybe, but to ourselves?"

"But then Alan would be locked up," said Tegan with disgust, "and I'd be a boy."

"It's just until you work out a solution with your parents," said Prunella.

"If you girls switched bodies," Alan suggested, "gender wouldn't be an issue."

Tegan literally put her foot down. "No more talk of body switching," she demanded. "I don't want to be locked up, and I don't want anyone else to be locked up in my place."

As Alan struggled for a response, the door opened and Victor stuck in his floppy-eared head. "I can hear everything you're saying," he told them. "I don't see the big deal. They set us free. So what if they're crooks?"

"Yeah," said C.V., who entered the room after him. "It's not like they can force us to use our powers for evil."

In the kitchen, Mansch and Bernie were talking between bites of bacon. "What exactly are you planning to do with those kids?" Bernie inquired. "Train them to be thieves?"

"No," Mansch answered in a lofty tone. "They're destined for much greater things. And so am I."

----

Arthur arrived at Lakewood on Monday morning of the eighth week of the school year, too distracted about the unexplained absences of his friends Buster, Alan, and Prunella to think about his new responsibilities as student body president. He and the other kids exchanged somber pleasantries as they sat down at their desks in Mrs. Krantz's classroom.

"Before I start the roll call," said the teacher, "is there anyone else who would like to disappear?"

She couldn't have picked a worse question to ask. Sue Ellen suddenly clutched her head and started to scream in pain.

She collapsed onto the floor, writhing and wailing. It was like nothing her friends had ever seen.

"Where does it hurt, dear?" asked Mrs. Krantz with motherly concern, just before the cat girl vanished in a puff of light.

The blinding agony faded rapidly, and Sue Ellen realized that she was no longer at school. As she looked around, she started to wonder if she was even on Earth.

The room had bare gray walls with regularly placed indentations that resembled round windows. It contained a variety of raised platforms with what appeared to be complex control panels. Three bizarre creatures surrounded them--uniformed beings with inhumanly long arms and opaque spheres covering their heads.

Each of the life forms raised one arm and pointed a weapon at the bewildered girl. "You are a prisoner of the Alliance," one of them stated. "Do not resist."

"P-prisoner?" Sue Ellen stammered, only to be pushed rudely forward by the other two beings.

They marched her down a long hallway with a slanted roof and yellowish walls adorned with indecipherable inscriptions. The air was cold, and smelled somewhat like stale bread. She wondered whether the sphere-heads who had accosted her were real space aliens, or mere theme-park employees.

They made a left turn into a small enclosure, then soared upward for what seemed like a mile or two. It was like taking a ride in an elevator with a missing door. Sue Ellen's captors led her past an array of cells sealed by metal latticeworks. She recognized one of the inmates through a chain-link door--it was her adopted sister and future self, April Murphy.

"April?" she called out in surprise.

"They got you, too," the older girl said flatly. She seemed emotionally drained for some reason.

As the aliens shoved Sue Ellen through an opened prison door, a woman cried from across the hallway, "Let her go! She's done nothing wrong!"

That voice...

Sue Ellen whirled.

It wasn't possible.

Behind the opposite cell door stood two people she had believed to be dead...

"Mom! Dad?"

Her delight at seeing her parents, or apparitions who resembled her parents, was abruptly interrupted when the three aliens slammed the door, trapping her in a lonely cell.

She clawed at the steel grating like an animal, desperate to break through, to be reunited. "Mom! Dad!" she shrieked. "You're not dead! You're alive!"

"Yes, honey," her mother said in an unmistakable, sweet voice. "We have a lot of explaining to do." She wore a white uniform, and her bright red hair was tied with a band in the rear.

Emotion wrenched Sue Ellen's heart, and tears poured down her cheeks. "Why weren't you shot?" she begged to know. "Why aren't you dead?"

"Our deaths were faked," her father explained calmly, "just as yours was. You see, I'm not a diplomat, or a CIA agent, or a CIA assassin. I'm a spy for the planet Yordil."

"What?" exclaimed Sue Ellen and April in unison.

"Yes, it's true," said Mrs. Armstrong. "Your parents are aliens."

"Wait," said April incredulously. "That means we're aliens, too."

"I don't feel like an alien," Sue Ellen reflected.

"All cat people on Earth are descendants of Yordilian colonists," Mr. Armstrong explained. "They're almost indistinguishable from Yordilians. The only major differences are in the brain. That's why you suddenly got a splitting headache when the Alliance police detected you and transported you here."

"They're rounding up all the Yordilians on Earth and Schmektorr," Mrs. Armstrong added.

"What's Schmektorr?" Sue Ellen asked.

"That's where we were assigned after leaving Earth," her father answered.

"Before you were born, we were sent to Earth as spies," her mother added. "When you were very small, a disaster took place on Yordil, and all the males were killed. We didn't want you to grow up on a planet with no boys and no hope of marriage, so we chose to stay on Earth. But the Yordilian authorities weren't happy about that, so they tried to find us and force us to return. That's why we moved all the time."

"That's crazy," April remarked.

"Yes, it is," her father agreed. "That's why I made up the story about being a CIA agent--because the real truth was even more unbelievable. When the Yordilian agents finally caught up with us, they agreed that you two could stay on Earth, since you had citizenship, and Yordil had more than enough girls already. I told you I was an assassin, because I hoped it would discourage you from trying to avenge our deaths. Then we were taken back to Yordil, and sent to spy on the planet Schmektorr."

"So Buster was right," Sue Ellen mused. "We've been aliens all along, and I never knew it."

"But I can't leave the planet," April protested. "I'm awaiting trial for stealing the Los Cactos crystal."

"What are we charged with, anyway?" Sue Ellen wondered.

"The Yordilians have abducted males from various planets to serve as boyfriends and husbands," her mother replied. "In return, the Alliance is abducting the Yordilians on Earth, Schmektorr, and maybe other planets as well. I imagine they'll propose an exchange of prisoners."

"But the Yordilian government will never publicly acknowledge that it has spies on other planets," Mr. Armstrong added. "Which means we may be here for a long, long time."

----

to be continued


	19. Meeting of the Minds

Sue Ellen's abrupt disappearance left the entire class slack-jawed in astonishment. No one, especially Mrs. Krantz, could think of a word to say.

Finally George interrupted the stunned silence. "The aliens took her!" he blurted out.

Muffy glared at the moose boy, as if to remind him of the promise he had made to keep Buster's abduction a secret.

"Maybe it was that Grobblitz fellow," Van suggested.

"What would he want with Sue Ellen?" Beat wondered.

"Maybe there's a shortage of curly hair on his planet," Francine theorized.

While Mrs. Krantz frantically searched under the desks for her adopted daughter, Muffy tried to defuse the mystery before her friends came too close to the truth. "People don't just disappear," she said skeptically. "If you ask me, it's just a Halloween prank. Sue Ellen, Buster, Alan, Prunella, the triplets--they're all in it together."

"Their parents don't think it's a joke," Arthur pointed out.

"Then they must be part of the lie as well," said Muffy with certainty. "It's a far-reaching conspiracy."

Arthur groaned. He had just been elected student body president, and now his friends were vanishing left and right without explanation. Never before had he felt so powerless.

----

Alan felt incredibly weird. It was Monday morning, a school morning, but he wasn't at school. Yet he didn't feel weird because he wasn't at school--he felt weird because he wanted to be at school. He looked forward to Monday mornings and the excitement and challenge of a new school week. Other kids didn't. That made him weird.

It didn't help that he was in the company of five other truant children, as well as two career criminals.

"While I was merged with the scientists at Ballford Prep," his sister Tegan was explaining, "I learned about another school where two more children are being held. It's called Trumbull Academy, and it's somewhere in Scepter City." The bear girl's cropped brown hair had grown only half an inch since she had cut it earlier to avoid detection.

"What do you know about these children?" Mansch inquired of her. "What powers do they have?"

"The girl's a telepath," Tegan answered. "She has a range of over a mile. I don't know about the boy."

"The girl would make a useful addition to our force," Mansch remarked. "We'll check it out this evening. If we decide it's worth further investigation, you and Alan may get a chance to put your body-switching powers to the test."

"Uh, you're not planning to do anything illegal, are you?" asked Prunella in a concerned tone.

"Holding children against their will is illegal," said Mansch self-righteously. "If I set them free, I'm only upholding the law."

Clearly not reassured by the cat man's declaration, Prunella rose and left the table where Alan, Tegan, C.V., Claire, and Victor were holding conference with Mansch and his partner, Bernie.

She was standing with her face toward a corner, moping anxiously, when Alan and Tegan walked up to her. "Those men scare me," she admitted. "This house scares me. I miss my mom and dad."

Alan laid his hands on her shoulders and grinned facetiously. "You can go home if you want. And when you wake up in the morning, you'll forget all about this scary house and those scary men."

Prunella let out a sigh of resignation.

"Maybe you'll be lucky," said Alan. "Maybe we'll find a kid with healing powers who can fix the problem with your memory."

"Someone's gonna get hurt," the rat girl worried.

"Maybe not," said Tegan encouragingly. "If we switch Mansch with one of the guards, all he has to do is walk in and..."

The girl stopped in mid-thought. An expression of glazed terror gripped her face.

"What's wrong?" her brother asked.

Tegan screamed as if demons were gnawing at her brain.

All at the table leaped to their feet. While Alan and Prunella wondered how to help, Tegan clutched her scalp and wailed in agony. Thinking the neuroblocker barette might be the cause of her torment, she ripped it from her head and tossed it onto the floor. This only made matters worse, as Prunella and Alan suddenly felt her pain as well.

Then, before the dumbfounded eyes of everyone present, she glowed briefly and vanished.

----

April leaned against the cell door, gazing through the mesh at her parents, who were confined across the way. She had spent nearly half an hour in the bare, dreary quarters, listening to the constant humming sound of what she guessed was a spaceship, and wishing she could burst free and embrace her mother and father, whom she had thought to be dead.

"I just can't believe it," she said quietly and wistfully. "I came back in time to stop you from being killed, but you were never killed to begin with."

She heard a noise of whining and confused footsteps from the neighboring cell, and then the door in front of her flew open. She quickly put out a sneaker-clad foot to stop herself from falling.

Two sphere-headed aliens with drawn weapons stood outside, and were escorting a peevish-looking Sue Ellen into April's prison unit. "We just brought another one on board, and we need to free up your cell," one of the aliens explained in a deep-pitched voice. "Since you two look so much alike, we figured you would get along."

The metal door slid closed, trapping Sue Ellen and her almost-thirteen future self together. The alien guards turned sharply and marched away.

"Are you okay?" asked April with a smile.

"Yeah," Sue Ellen replied. "A little scared." She glanced around the cramped, dimly-lit habitation. "Does your cell have a bathroom? I really need to pee."

"Pick a corner, and I'll turn my back," April quipped.

While the two cat girls pondered the lack of septic facilities, a bizarre, but not altogether unfamiliar, sensation took hold of their minds. The barrier separating the thoughts of one from those of the other dissolved, and they could read each other perfectly without words. They had experienced such a melding of consciousness once before, when Alan and Tegan had stripped Francine's personality from their brains.

They both realized at once who the occupant of Sue Ellen's old cell was.

"I'm sorry," came Tegan's telepathic voice. "I've lost my barette. I can't stop myself from merging."

"How did you end up here?" asked Sue Ellen and April in mental unison.

"The same way that you did," was Tegan's reply. The speech-free conversation proceeded at the speed of thought.

"But you're not an alien," the cat girls observed.

"But you two are," Tegan mused. "Interesting."

"Interesting indeed," thought Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong, who were near enough to be drawn into the involuntary mind merge. "We spent many years on Earth, but you're the first human telepath we've encountered. Are there others like you?"

"Many," Tegan answered.

"The sphere-heads must have detected you and brought you aboard because of the differences in your brain," thought the Armstrong parents. "They should figure out before long that you're not a Yordilian spy."

"Alan and Prunella are with you," Sue Ellen realized with relief. "We were worried about them, especially Prunella, because of her condition."

"But Buster and the triplets are still unaccounted for," April added.

"Triplets?" the girls' parents inquired.

Sue Ellen began to explain the brief visit of the Belnap family to the neighborhood. As she did so, images of the cat woman and her three daughters formed in the minds of her parents, followed by sudden shock and outrage.

"She's a Yordilian," Mrs. Armstrong stated. "I recognize her. She's one of the richest women on the planet."

"If Buster disappeared at the same time they did," thought Mr. Armstrong, "that can mean only one thing."

"Omigosh," Sue Ellen marveled. "It's finally happened. Buster's been abducted by aliens!"

----

to be continued


	20. Planet of the Cat Girls

Buster landed on his back, on a warm, foamy surface. Amy Belnap was on top of him, pinning his shoulders and smiling triumphantly. He knew instantly that he was no longer in the old Tibble house, as the room and its furnishings were stranger than anything he had ever seen on Earth.

Amy backed away and allowed him to stand. The temperature was a bit too cold for his liking. Against one wall sat a garishly colored, intricately filigreed item resembling a couch with one long cushion. A laminated picture hung over it, showing him the image of a mountain range covered with what looked like purple snow. On either side of the couch stood a transparent, slanted shelf with exotic-looking potted plants. The spongy covering underneath his shoes was apparently a wall-to-wall green carpet. Everything in the spacious room appeared alien, yet shiny and neat.

His first question was an obvious choice. "Where am I?"

The cat girl in the blue velvet dress beamed at him. "This is my house on the planet Yordil," she explained.

Buster looked around quickly; the glowing portal that had transported him to this place was nowhere to be seen. He cared little, as intense curiosity was getting the better of him.

Before he took a step, however, a tall cat woman with flowing blond hair walked up to him and Amy. She wore a drab gray pantsuit with a wavy collar, and her face was painted with beige makeup and thin horizontal lines on her brow. The sight of Buster seemed to thrill her beyond words.

"Kapu Buster Baxter garg," Amy said to the cat woman.

"Kapu zelt vidap garg," was the gushing reply.

While Buster looked back and forth at the pair, trying to make sense of their gibberish, the woman pulled a device from the metallic belt around her hips. She pointed its long end at the rabbit boy, and a reddish beam emanated from it, enveloping his body.

"Uh, what are you doing?" he asked. "I'm getting goosebumps."

The cat woman switched off the scanning device and reattached it to her belt. She then waved her hand in front of a bureau, and one of the drawers opened automatically. Inside lay a bulky device with a molded plastic coating and several buttons and knobs on the front. This she lifted up and placed carefully around Buster's neck, latching the two ends together so that it fit him like a leash.

"This thing's cold," the boy complained. "It's heavy, too."

"I am sorry if you do not find it comfortable," said the woman in a friendly tone.

Buster gaped. "Now you're speaking English."

"No," said the cat woman, her words out of step with the movement of her lips. "I am speaking Yordilian. The device around your neck is a translator."

Intrigued, Buster rubbed his fingers over the front panel of the collar-like gadget. "What does this button do?" he inquired before carelessly pushing it.

"Pancake zebra supreme jogging," said the woman, reaching forward to correct the settings on the translator.

"This is so cool," Buster marveled. "I'm really on another planet. A planet with aliens."

"I can't wait to show you everything," said Amy, seizing his arm.

While she dragged him through the mansion-like domicile toward what looked to him like a varnished wooden door ornamented with small bumps, he asked, "What was that laser thing she used on me?"

"It's a gene gun," Amy told him. "Marmel was just recording your DNA signature."

"Marmel?"

"She's one of my mom's servants."

The wooden doors sailed open as they drew near, and Buster discovered that the outside of the house was much, much more interesting than the inside.

The sky was completely pink, except for some scattered purple clouds. A glowing yellow orb rested in its midst, a bit paler than Earth's sun.

"I'll have to get you a coat," said Amy. "My planet's colder than yours."

Buster didn't mind the cool weather as much as the translating device that chafed his neck and shoulders. "Don't you have something that goes in my ear?" he asked Amy.

"Sorry," the cat girl responded. "Our technology isn't that advanced yet."

She led him to the edge of a smooth lane, where an occasional hovering vehicle flew by at a modest speed. A row of fine-looking houses stretched into the distance, each with high quasi-adobe walls and a lawn of orange clover leaves. The sheer variety of colors almost bowled him over.

"This is the town where I live," Amy informed him. "It's called Pudalump. The people here are very nice."

Very nice, but not very creative when it came to fashion, Buster mused. Every one of the women and children he saw along the sides of the street wore a variation of the pantsuit and wavy collar he had seen on Marmel. Most wore no shoes, but a few sported leather-like slippers. In physical form they were indistinguishable from the cat people on his own planet. Yet the more he observed them, the more he recognized that something was amiss.

"I don't see any men," he commented. "Are they all at work?"

Amy was about to reply, when two Yordilian children, one Buster's size and the other a little larger, turned and stared at him with amazement. Both had straight black hair cut off at the ears and reaching down to their backs. Their mother looked at Buster also, her expression also one of delighted surprise.

Their mouths agape, the two children raced toward him and scanned him with their eager blue eyes. They paid special attention to his long ears.

"Are you…" the older child began, "are you a…boy?"

"Yeah," Buster answered glibly.

"He's my boy," Amy interjected sternly.

"He's so cute!" enthused the younger child.

"Hey, everybody!" the older child shouted in a high-pitched voice. "It's a boy! An Earth boy!"

Being the center of attention always made Buster nervous. Being thronged by squealing alien children and their mothers was almost too much for him to endure. As the crowd curiously tugged at his clothes and ears, he rubbed his hand over his pocket to make sure his inhaler was still there in case he needed it.

"Get your hands off him!" Amy snarled at the mob. "He belongs to me!"

"Look at those big ears," marveled a small child. "I'll bet he can hear a hovercar coming a mile away."

"Mommy, I want a boy," whined a kid who seemed about Buster's age.

As he fended off the groping little hands, the anxious rabbit boy started to realize the truth behind his odd situation. He turned to the girl who had brought him to Yordil.

"Amy," he asked earnestly, "are there no boys on your planet?"

"Only a handful," the cat girl answered. "All the males were killed in a disaster eight years ago."

Horror wrenched Buster's gut. His throat tightened. Gasping, he stuck his hand into his pocket to retrieve his inhaler.

"What's that thing?" asked one of the alien girls, trying to wrest the medical device from his hand. He tried to warn her away, but no words would come.

"Come with me," said Amy, leading Buster by the hand toward the entrance to her mansion. The mass of girls trailed him, but he managed to squeeze in a few puffs of asthma medication.

Once inside and safe, he started to breathe heavily. "Amy…I want…to go…home now," he wheezed.

"You can't," said the girl, smirking wickedly.

Buster nearly dropped his inhaler from the shock. "What…what do you mean, I can't?"

"You're bound to me," Amy told him. "When we're of age, we'll be married."

"I don't want to marry you!" Buster protested frantically. As if to emphasize his objection, he yanked the heavy translator from his neck and flung it aside.

"You don't have to marry me," said Amy, advancing affectionately. "But you can't marry anyone else. It's Yordilian law."

The rabbit boy glanced around, as if seeking an escape route. "You can run," Amy continued, "but there's nowhere to go. Now that your DNA signature is recorded in the global genetic database, I can find you no matter where you are. The Yordilian police carry gene guns. Every place of business has a gene scanner. If I declare you a fugitive, you won't be able to walk into a restaurant or food store without setting off alarms. And I know how much you like to eat, Buster."

The desperate nature of his predicament didn't take long to sink in. He looked through the diamond-shaped window at the multitude of Yordilian girls lining the street. They cheered and hooted loudly when they saw his face through the glass.

A plan took shape in his mind. A wild plan, but one that might enable him to reach the planetary authorities without being harassed. A potentially embarrassing plan…

"Okay, Amy," he said in a defeated tone, "you win. I'll stay."

The cat girl raised up on her heels and gave him a peck on the cheek.

"But I want to see more of your planet," Buster went on, "and I don't want to be chased by girls everywhere I go. So I'll need a disguise."

"I know what you're thinking," said Amy. "It won't work."

"Why not?"

"Girls from other planets aren't allowed on Yordil. You'd attract even more attention as an Earth girl than as an Earth boy."

Buster's ears crumpled. Yet another excuse to walk around in a dress and wig had slipped from his grasp.

----

"Our analysis shows that you are not Yordilian, but human," stated the bass-voiced, sphere-headed alien. "We apologize for the error."

Tegan smiled with gratification. Ten feet away, Sue Ellen and April stood outside the range of her mind-merging influence. A ceiling shaped like a huge arch loomed above them, and dozens of windows leading to nowhere lined the circular walls. Several sphere-heads were laboring over electronic consoles nearby.

To April and Sue Ellen the alien said, "Since you were born on Earth and consider it your home, you will be permitted to return."

"What about our parents?" Sue Ellen asked.

"The Yordilian spies will remain here," replied the being, which had no visible mouth and stood perfectly still.

"We're not leaving without them," said April with finality.

"You may stay if you wish," said the alien with a hint of concern, "but you would most likely never see Earth again."

The cat girls stared at each other with wide eyes.

Earth. Their parents. Earth. Their parents.

"I am a Thrag," the sphere-head related. "The concept of separate genders is foreign to me. I understand, however, that you, being females, will eventually desire male companionship. You have little chance of finding it on Yordil."

Tegan watched with sympathy as the bewildered girls struggled to make up their minds.

"I don't know what to do," said Sue Ellen quietly. "I love Mom and Dad, and I'm glad they're alive, but…but I don't want to live on a planet without boys."

"I understand," said April gently. "You still have feelings for Arthur. I lost those feelings a long time ago."

"But that doesn't mean I will."

"You could ask Arthur to go to Yordil with you," April suggested. "But I don't know what he would say."

"He'd probably jump at the chance to get away from D.W.," Sue Ellen joked.

"What is your decision?" the sphere-head demanded.

"We need more time!" the girls pleaded in unison.

"Time is irrelevant," said the alien. "To spare you the anguish of making an impossible choice, I will choose for you. You will return to Earth."

"No, please!" April cried out.

"You wish to stay?"

"Just another minute!" Sue Ellen begged.

"Very well," declared the alien. "You have exactly one Earth minute to decide."

Consternated and hopeless, April turned to her past self. "Great!" she snapped. "Now what do we do?"

"Mom and Dad would want us to stay on Earth," Sue Ellen observed.

"But we're Yordilians," April pointed out. "We don't belong on Earth."

"What kind of people kidnap boys and take them into space?" Sue Ellen wondered.

"If the roles were reversed, Earth would do the same thing," April claimed.

Their debate proved futile. "Your time is up," announced the sphere-head. "You will now be returned to Earth. There will be no further discussion."

"Wait!" Tegan interjected.

All eyes, both cat and Thrag, turned toward her.

----

to be continued


	21. Alan's Plan

For a professional thief, Raymond Mansch managed his anger well. On this occasion he had a lot to manage. Prunella and the Brainchildren noted the expression of barely contained fury on his goateed face as he returned to Bernie's living room after a fruitless hour of scouring the neighborhood for Tegan.

"No luck," the cat man told his partner. "She's gone, and a good job of it."

"Maybe we should call the police," Alan suggested.

"Don't be ridiculous," Mansch snapped. "They're looking for her already."

"Could be she has other powers besides the mind thing she does," theorized Bernie, who was puffing on a smelly cigar. "Maybe she's invisible, and she's watching us right now."

"I've considered that possibility," said Mansch, dropping himself into a recliner with a heavy sigh. "By the way, I thought I asked you not to smoke in front of the children."

"My house, my rules," said Bernie flippantly.

Mansch opened his mouth to make a peevish remark, when a strange light filled the room in which they sat. When it had faded, Tegan stood with folded arms next to the coffee table, a curly-headed cat girl on either side.

"What the…" Alan blurted out. "Sue Ellen? April?"

Before offering a word of explanation, Tegan bent over, plucked the neuroblocker barette from the table, and adorned her head with it.

"Where have you been?" demanded Mansch, rising. "I've looked everywhere. And who are these other girls?"

"Those are my friends," Alan told him. "The tall one is April, and the short one is Sue Ellen."

"What are you, twins?" Bernie queried.

"In a sense," April replied.

"You must be the terrible Mr. Mansch," said Sue Ellen to the cat man, who was only an inch or two taller than April.

"I'm still waiting for an explanation," said Mansch impatiently.

Tegan led her two companions to one of the couches, then began to speak. "We were beamed up to a space station by some interstellar cops. They were scanning Earth for aliens posing as humans, and they found us."

"What?" said Prunella, startled. "You mean…you're…"

"I'm not," said Tegan.

"This is where it gets crazy," said April. "It turns out our parents are alien spies from the planet Yordil, and we never knew it. They're alive, by the way."

If Alan and Prunella had been standing, the relevation would have knocked them flat.

"It gets better," Sue Ellen added. "The Belnap triplets are from Yordil. They're holding Buster on their planet."

"Wait," said the flustered Alan. "I'm having trouble following you. First we thought your parents were diplomats, then we thought they were CIA agents, then we thought they were murdered by enemy spies, but now they're alive, and they're really aliens?"

"Yes," April acknowledged. "Confusing, isn't it?"

"The male population of Yordil was wiped out by a rogue biological weapon," Tegan related. "The Armstrongs were on an assignment to Earth when it happened. Since then, the Yordilians have been abducting males from other planets for mating purposes."

"That's why the triplets were so obsessed with boys," Alan realized.

"Excuse me," Prunella interjected, "but who are these triplets you're talking about?"

"You've met them," said Alan.

"Now we have to choose between staying on Earth and going to Yordil with our parents," said Sue Ellen dolefully.

"If Yordil will even take them back," said April.

"It's a tough decision," said Tegan, "but I bought them some time. I offered the assistance of the Brainchildren in liberating the abducted males."

A shocked silence swept through the room.

"Come again?" said Mansch.

"Sue Ellen and April are Yordilians by birth," Tegan went on. "They can travel to Yordil without arousing suspicion. Once they get there, they can help pave the way for the Brainchildren to invade and free the captives."

"Hold on," Mansch objected. "We're not ready to fight a whole planet."

"Will our powers work against the aliens?" C.V. asked eagerly.

"Mine do," answered Tegan. "Their brains are similar to ours."

"If we go into space," Victor remarked, "we won't have to hide from the police anymore. We'll be free."

"Vive la liberté," Claire enthused.

"It's an intriguing prospect, cooperating with aliens," Mansch admitted wistfully. "But we'll need reinforcements, and we'll need training. The children have no experience using their powers to defend against real enemies."

"Buster needs us," said Alan boldly. "I want to help."

"So do I," Prunella added, "though I don't know what good I can do."

"But I may need your help to free the Brainchildren from Trumbull Academy," Mansch reminded Alan. "Then again," he continued thoughtfully, "I think I can pull it off with just Victor, Claire, and C.V., but we'd have to do it at night." He nodded approvingly. "All right, Alan. Go talk to the aliens."

The bear boy jumped to his feet. As he strode in Tegan's direction, he paused to look over his shoulder at Prunella and cast her an encouraging glance.

"Uh, I don't know," said the rat girl meekly. "I'm afraid I'd only get in the way."

"Please come," Alan urged her. "Otherwise you'll be here all alone with Bernie."

"And his secondhand smoke," Mansch quipped.

With a bit of reluctance, Prunella rose and shuffled over to join Alan, Tegan, Sue Ellen, and April.

"What now?" Alan wondered. "Do we just wait around to be…"

A burst of energy surrounded the five. By the time Alan completed his sentence with "beamed up", they were standing on a transport pad within an alcove of the spacious alien control center.

A tall, sphere-headed Thrag officer approached, a weapon and other devices dangling from his belt. "Welcome," he intoned. "There is no reason to fear. I am Lieutenant T'l'p'g'r of the Alliance Star Police."

Alan and Prunella had seen a space alien before, but the realization that they were inside an actual alien craft left them speechless. They couldn't tell if the long-armed beings seated at the consoles were looking at them, as the round crystal helmets concealed whatever eyes they might have.

"Go ahead," Tegan goaded her brother. "Say something."

Alan bashfully stepped forward. "I am Alan Powers from the planet Earth," he announced. "I come in peace."

_Weird_, thought Prunella as she gazed at the space cop. _I wonder if I can see the future in his head._

"Walk this way," said T'l'p'g'r, who turned about and moved with inhumanly long strides. Alan, Tegan, Prunella, Sue Ellen, and April followed, taking large steps to keep up.

The alien led them through several angular corridors. The temperature was pleasant, but the air was a bit thin, and they were soon panting. A few sphere-heads passed by them, as well as a creature with a quill-covered head and fangs. A metal door with a diagonal lattice pattern slid aside, allowing them into a large hall where dozens of cat people in plain uniforms were seated on benches.

Alan and Prunella froze in their tracks.

"Omigosh, it's true," Prunella exclaimed.

Hank and Daisy Armstrong were walking toward them with broad smiles.

"Well, hello, Alan," said Mr. Armstrong warmly. "And Prunella, too."

"You must be very surprised to see us," his wife added.

"'Surprised' doesn't begin to describe it," said Alan. "We all thought you were dead."

"No, we're very much alive," the tall cat man assured him.

"Although we're prisoners here," Mrs. Armstrong complained, "for who knows how long."

"Are you ready to begin the transfer?" Tegan asked the feline couple.

"What transfer?" Alan inquired.

"If Sue Ellen and April are to infiltrate Yordilian society," Tegan explained to him, "they need to become familiar with the language and culture. I intend to use my mental powers to give them the knowledge of their parents."

"Ah, I see," said Alan with interest.

"It will take some time," Tegan told him. "You may want to find a math book to read."

As she retreated to a corner of the hall with the Armstrongs and their daughters, Prunella and Alan returned to the corridor with the alien T'l'p'g'r.

Alan took a deep breath. "I've been thinking of a plan," he stated. "It won't bring back all the abducted people, but it may save our friend Buster."

"Go on," said the sphere-head.

"Here's what we do," Alan began. "Sue Ellen, April, Tegan, and I go to Yordil. Sue Ellen and April tell the authorities that they want to live on their home planet, and they brought their boyfriends along. Sue Ellen's boyfriend is me, of course, and April's boyfriend is Tegan disguised as a boy."

"Ewww," groaned Prunella.

"She's already got the hair for it," Alan continued. "Once we're there, we find Buster and use our powers to save him from the Belnaps."

"The Belnaps are in our custody, except for Amy," T'l'p'g'r informed him.

"That makes things even easier."

"You are brave," the Thrag policeman remarked, "but it would be unwise for us to place Earth children in danger for the sole purpose of rescuing one boy."

"Buster's my friend," said Alan. "I'll accept the risk."

"I shall have to discuss your plan with my superiors," said T'l'p'g'r flatly.

The alien's tone sounded noncommittal to Alan. He quickly came up with an idea.

"I figure you owe us a favor or two," he said slyly. "You did, after all, make Sue Ellen and April miss a day of school. A Monday, no less."

The sphere-head didn't seem to react.

"School Monday is the most important, most anticipated part of an Earth child's week," Alan went on as Prunella tried not to roll her eyes. "Take it away, and the rest of the week is ruined. But I wouldn't expect you to understand that. You aliens probably don't have such a thing as school. You probably gained your knowledge by connecting your brain to a computer."

Alan wasn't sure if his speech had produced any effect, as T'l'p'g'r's opaque helmet betrayed no emotions.

"We apologize for interfering with your friends' educational process," the alien finally said. "We will make whatever reparations we must."

"Good," said Alan with pleasure. "And while we're on the subject of reparations, my good friend Prunella would like to make a special request."

The rat girl stared at him in confusion. He winked.

"Oh," Prunella blurted out in sudden realization. "Um, your medical science is more advanced than Earth's medical science, right?"

"Affirmative," T'l'p'g'r replied.

"Then maybe you can help me." Prunella's confidence grew. "My short-term memory is broken. Every morning I forget what happened the day before."

"The medical facilities on this station are limited," said the alien, "but they may serve. I will speak to my superiors. Is there anything else you desire?"

"Yes," answered Alan without hesitation. "A good night's sleep."

----

to be continued


	22. The Mission Begins

"I'm a marriage counselor, not a theologian," said Mr. Powers calmly. "I'm not qualified to say which of you is right when it comes to questions of religion. However, I personally believe that wanting to be right is more important than being right. Valerie, do you believe Mel wants to be right, or do you think he deliberately wants to be wrong?"

"I…think he wants to be right," replied the duck woman without looking up at her husband.

"What do you think, Mel? Does Valerie want to be right, or does she want to be wrong?"

"Same answer," said Mr. Cooper gruffly.

"There you have it," said Mr. Powers with satisfaction. "You both want to be right, yet you disagree. Which means that somewhere between what you believe, Mel, and what you believe, Valerie, lies the truth." He glanced at the wall clock. "It's been a wonderful session. We made substantial progress today."

"Before we go," Mrs. Cooper spoke up, "I just want to tell you…I know how you and your wife must feel. When Odette was kidnapped it was so painful for us. It's painful just to remember."

"Thanks for the sentiments," said Mr. Powers. "I have confidence Alan will show up."

As Mrs. Cooper stepped out of the office, her husband leaned over and muttered to her, "He seems unusually unconcerned."

----

Arthur and D.W. returned after a day of schooling to find their parents hard at work. Mr. Read was busily adding a border of frosting to a 50th birthday cake, while Mrs. Read, she of the slightly protruding belly, was dusting the piano.

"How was school, kids?" she called out.

"Crazy," Arthur answered. "Sue Ellen disappeared during first period."

"Very strange," his mother remarked. "April disappeared at about the same time."

"Something really creepy's going on," said Arthur, removing his pack.

"Pretty soon all your friends will be gone," said D.W. "Then you'll have nobody to play with but me. We'll have so much fun together."

"What if I disappear too?"

"Don't even think about it."

"There is some good news," Mr. Read announced. "Mrs. Chanel approached me about a catering contract."

"Great!" Arthur gushed. "Now I'm student body president, _and_ we're rich."

"Not exactly," said his father. "But the extra income means we may not have to move. And that's not all." He tickled D.W.'s chin. "We'll be able to afford the piano lessons you've always wanted."

D.W. became serious. "I've always wanted piano lessons?"

"Don't you want to learn to play the piano like your brother?" said her father with glee.

"No," answered D.W., shaking her head vigorously. "I'd rather play something that annoys Arthur. Like the accordion."

"How about singing lessons?" Arthur suggested. "You can become a great singer, like Justin Timberlake."

"No way," D.W. retorted. "I'd have to take singing lessons for fifty hundred years to be as good as Justin Timberlake."

"You'll take piano lessons, and you'll like piano lessons," said Mr. Read, although he left out the "you'll take piano lessons" part. "And you'll have the best piano teacher in the world—Dr. Frederick Fugue."

"Oh, you'll love Dr. Fugue," said Arthur facetiously. "He always has fresh cookies. Just watch out for his knitting needles."

"I hate Dr. Feud," D.W. grumbled.

As Arthur was about to sit down for a bout of TV watching, he noticed something peculiar. "Why are there two dogs in here?" he demanded to know.

"Buster's puppy is staying with us," his mother explained. A pair of yellow dogs, one very small, lay at his feet and stared lazily at his pants.

"I've got Pal," Arthur protested. "I don't need another dog."

"She's not your dog."

Unbeknownst to him, Pal and his baby sister Amazon Puppy were engaged in a conversation.

"I miss the kid with the big ears," Amazon Puppy whined.

"I hope they find him soon," said Pal, who was barely hiding his jealously over another dog being present in his house. (His motto was, "Thou shalt have no other dogs before me.")

"I like him," said Amazon wistfully. "But he's kinda clumsy. He broke me."

"What do you mean, he broke you?"

"I dunno. But he had to take me to the vet to get fixed."

On the TV screen, the members of the Bunny League were locked in grim combat with winged alien warriors. As they cleared a path through the invading hordes to the leader, they were shocked to discover that it was none other than their friend and teammate, Hawk Bunny.

"How could you betray us?" said Bionic Bunny mournfully. "How could you betray Earth?"

"Don't sweat it," Hawk Bunny responded. "It's only until I find out that they really intend to blow up the planet, and then I'll switch sides again."

The phone rang. "Arthur, it's for you."

When he answered, he heard Francine's voice.

"Get over to Mrs. Krantz' house right away. Sue Ellen and April are back, and they say they know where Buster is."

----

"Yes, we know where he is," said April smugly, "but it's a secret."

Sue Ellen was equally tight-lipped. No one present was pleased with the girls' responses, except for Mrs. Krantz, who was so delighted at the return of her adopted daughters that she would have kept smiling through a tsunami.

"Come on, you can tell us," Arthur goaded them. "It's not like we won't believe you."

"Two weeks ago I turned into a rock," said Francine. "What could be weirder than that?"

"What about Alan?" Muffy inquired. "And Prunella? And the triplets? Do you know where they are?"

"Alan and Prunella are fine," Sue Ellen told them. "As for the triplets, I wouldn't count on seeing them again."

"We'll tell you everything once Buster comes back," said April. "With any luck, that'll be tomorrow."

"You're always keeping secrets from us," Fern chided her. "I don't like it."

"I don't either. But this one's a doozy."

----

Tuesday morning arrived. It would be an exciting, fateful day.

"Let's go, girls," said Mrs. Krantz, who was holding open the door to her convertible. "You'll be late for school, and I'll be late for teaching."

"Just a minute, Mom," said Sue Ellen, who stood motionlessly in the yard, a book bag slung over her shoulder.

"I wonder how much longer we'll have to call her Mom," April whispered to her.

"What are you trying to do, take root?" said the moose woman impatiently.

There was a brief flash of light, and the cat girls were gone.

Mrs. Krantz groaned. "Here we go again…"

In Bernie's living room, the bold adventurers Alan, Tegan, and Prunella assumed statue-like poses and waited for the rapture. Tegan wore slacks and a cotton sweater which helped to hide her female characteristics. The only feature that might identify her as a girl was the barette on her head. The others were casually dressed.

"Do you still remember what happened yesterday?" she asked Prunella.

"No, I forgot it all when I washed my hair," the rat girl joked. "Of course, duh."

"If the operation is a success," said Tegan, "you won't need me anymore. You'll be able to go home."

"I won't have to hang around these criminal types anymore," Prunella remarked. "Neither will Alan."

"Do these pants make my butt look big?" Tegan worried.

"That's something a girl would say," Alan quipped.

In an instant they were standing on the transporter pad, face to face with Sue Ellen, April, and the friendly alien T'l'p'g'r.

"The portal will open in one Earth hour," the sphere-head informed them. "It will lead to the transportation hub nearest the Belnap mansion. Luck is a concept foreign to us Thrags, but I wish you luck nonetheless."

"Thanks, T'l'p'g'r," said Tegan, priding herself on the correct pronunciation of the name. Lowering her pitch, she added, "What do you think? Will I pass as a boy?"

"If you're lucky."

Prunella stepped forward. "I'm ready for the operation."

"Follow me," said the alien.

The rat girl walked confidently and without fear, thanks to the anti-anxiety mind-merge sessions she had enjoyed with Tegan.

The brave quartet began to deliberate over the upcoming quest. "Sue Ellen and I are now fluent Yordilian speakers," said April, "though we should do our best to keep that fact hidden."

"This is the toughest thing I've ever done," Alan fretted. "I'm about to enter a totally different world. How should I act?"

"Like someone who just entered a totally different world," said Sue Ellen.

"The important thing is to make it look like you don't know what you're doing or where you're going," said Tegan.

An hour passed, and T'l'p'g'r returned. "The surgery has commenced," he told them. "Do not fear for your friend. Our medical technology is thousands of years beyond that of Earth."

"Is that thousands of years ahead, or thousands of years behind?" Sue Ellen asked.

The sphere-head seemed to glare at him.

"Just asking."

"As if saving Buster isn't hard enough," said Alan, "I have to think about Prunella on the operating table, with alien surgeons cutting into her brain."

"Maybe they'll make improvements," said April.

"Come with me," said T'l'p'g'r. "It is time to begin your mission."

----

to be continued


	23. Airport Security

The transportation hub of the Yordilian city Exel was a crowded venue that resembled an airport security gate stretching endlessly in all directions. It was manned by uniformed cat women who never smiled. Upon passing through the interstellar portal set up by the Thrag police, Alan, Tegan, Sue Ellen, and April found themselves at the back of a long, long line of alien creatures. The waiting was killing them.

"This is worse than when I flew to Nigeria from La Guardia," April and Sue Ellen remarked in unison.

"When they scan your genes, they'll know right away that you're a girl," Alan cautioned his sister. "You have a plan for that, right?"

"Trust me," Tegan assured him.

Time passed slowly, and the entertained themselves by singing a song George had invented years ago: "Infinity bottles of milk on the wall, infinity bottles of milk, take one down, pass it around, infinity bottles of milk on the wall. Infinity bottles of milk on the wall, infinity bottles of milk…"

Time still passed slowly. The aliens ahead of them shot them funny looks.

Finally the line of exotic beings dwindled, and the foursome confronted a scowling security woman. April stepped forward first, and the officer enveloped her with a laser beam from her gene gun.

"Bluhg?" asked the cat woman.

April looked over the array of buttons on the console before her, and punched one with the inscription, EARTH/ENGLISH.

"Name?" asked the woman.

"April Krantz."

"Planet of origin?"

"Earth."

"Purpose of visit?"

April attempted to sound nervous. "I…well, my sister and I just found out the other day that our parents were Yordilians. We thought it might be best to come here and live with our own people, but first we want to…"

"Vacation," Sue Ellen interjected. "Say vacation."

"Vacation," said April.

"Where are you parents?" asked the security officer.

"Unaccounted for," April replied. "Possibly dead. But we have relatives here waiting for us."

"You're clean," said the cat woman.

April proceeded forward, and Sue Ellen submitted herself to a gene scan.

"Name?"

"Sue Ellen Krantz."

"Planet of origin?"

"Earth."

"Purpose of visit?"

"Same as my sister's."

"You're clean," said the officer.

Alan stood before her next. As she scanned him, a series of symbols flashed on her computer display.

"Name?"

"Alan Powers."

"Planet of origin?"

"Earth."

"Purpose of visit?"

"I'm Sue Ellen's boyfriend."

"You're clean."

As Tegan strolled forward, she lowered her barette halfway to the back of her head.

"Name?" inquired the officer without bothering to scan the girl.

"Tegan Powers," she replied in a deep voice while moving her barette to its old position.

"Purpose of visit?"

"I'm April's boyfriend."

"You're clean."

The others expressed amazement that Tegan had passed through the checkpoint without incident. "How'd you do it?" Alan asked quietly.

"I planted a memory in her brain that she had already scanned me," said the bear girl with pride.

"Let's not waste any time," said April.

Using their newfound ability to read Yordilian signs, she and Sue Ellen led the Powers siblings through the busy transportation center and into the open, rather chilly air of the planet. Alan and Tegan marveled at the clear pink skies above their heads, and the majestic skyscrapers in the distance.

"The tallest one must be more than a mile high," Alan commented.

They walked along a yellow cobblestone path in the midst of solemn-looking cat women and girls. There were no men to be seen. Hovercars with glass domes rushed past them on the nearby highway.

"It's not like any country I've ever been to," Sue Ellen remarked.

"It's incredible," Tegan gushed. "They must be a thousand years ahead of us."

"Use your boy voice," Alan reminded her.

They soon noticed that many of the cat women were giving them envious stares. A cat girl in a red pantsuit burst into a delighted grin upon seeing them.

"I just love your dresses," she spoke in Yordilian. "Where did you buy them? Don't say Earth."

"Er, we no not speak language the Yordilian," said April clumsily.

The girl smiled understandingly. "Cute boys," she said, and walked away.

They walked for roughly two miles under a pale sun. Following the directions T'l'p'g'r had provided, they entered an apparent residential area lined with brightly-colored and expensive-looking houses.

"There it is," said April cautiously. The Belnap mansion was three houses away.

"How do we know Buster's in there?" Alan wondered.

"We don't," said Tegan. "Stay here and hide behind something. I'll knock on the door. If Amy answers, she won't recognize me."

"Wait," said Alan, spying a half-dozen cat girls playing in a clover yard. "There could be trouble."

"You're right," Tegan acknowledged. "What do you suggest we…"

Alan had already sprung into action, scurrying headlong down the alien street. "Hey, girls!" he cried out. "It's Sadie Hawkins Day! If you can catch me, you can marry me!"

The Yordilian girls fixed their eager eyes on him. "Urtfletz! Urtfletz!" ("Earth boy! Earth boy!") they chanted with glee, and began to pursue.

Alan failed to take one factor into consideration—Yordilians were, on average, much better runners than humans. The hooting cat girls overtook him in almost no time. While they pawed his clothes and face, Tegan calmly strode up to the front door of the Belnap house.

Knock, knock.

Marmel answered. "Griffit," the servant woman greeted Tegan.

"Griffit," the bear girl repeated, assuming it was Yordilian for "hello".

As Marmel waited for a more meaningful response, Amy Belnap popped up next to her, still wearing a blue Earth dress. She gazed at Tegan suspiciously.

"You're from Earth, aren't you?" she inquired.

"Yes," Tegan answered in a low-pitched voice. "I think I have the wrong house. I'm sorry."

"Wait," Amy ordered. "Don't leave just yet." Turning around, she called loudly, "Buster, someone's here to see you!"

Tegan waited tensely. The familiar long ears of the captive rabbit boy appeared from behind a paneled wall. Buster was wearing a pantsuit not unlike those sported by the native girls, as Amy had seen no need to purchase Earth fashions for him.

He stifled a gasp upon recognizing the visitor.

"Do you know this kid?" Amy demanded.

"Er, ah, no," Buster stammered. "I've never seen her before in my life."

"HER?!"

"Oops," muttered the embarrassed boy.

Amy's eyes flashed fire at Tegan. "You've come to take my boyfriend away," she snarled. "Marmel, prux u gibmat."

The servant woman ducked away. Guessing that her adversary had said something along the lines of "call the police", Tegan backed away in a panic. She wasn't quick enough. Amy leaped into the air, lashing out with her slippered foot and striking the bear girl's neck. The stunning blow rendered Tegan instantly unconscious, and she slumped to the ground.

Seeing her distress, Alan shoved his way through the crowd of adoring girls and ran toward the mansion with all his might. Sue Ellen and April followed suit, jumping out from behind a well-trimmed orange hedge.

"You!" snapped Amy, immediately recognizing her one-time friends.

"Hand him over!" Sue Ellen demanded. "He doesn't belong to you!" While she and April confronted Amy, Alan tended to his injured sister, who lay prostrate over the smooth walkway.

"If you want him," said Amy menacingly, "you'll have to fight me for him."

"As you wish," said April.

Letting out a fierce battle cry, Amy threw herself at the two girls…

----

to be continued


	24. Cat Fight

April barely reacted in time to block Amy's soaring fist. The angry cat girl flipped about in midair and landed gracefully on her feet, teeth firmly clenched, ready for more action.

Sue Ellen and April lunged forward, bombarding their foe with powerful kicks and punches. Amy blocked every one of them with feline agility. It was like fighting a cat out of hell. Buster and all the girls and women in the neighborhood stood transfixed, breathlessly witnessing the two-on-one battle.

They had never faced such a strong and quick opponent. April managed to land a few punches, but Amy was clearly concentrating her effort on wearing down Sue Ellen, so as to have only one enemy to contend with. It was working—the younger girl was becoming tired and dizzy, her movements sluggish.

Finally, her face sore and bloody, she groaned and collapsed.

Amy paused and smiled triumphantly at the weary April. "You and me," she said confidently. Despite her age and size advantages, April knew she had no hope against the still-fresh combatant.

Then, as Amy was about to deliver the coup de gras, a presence announced itself in her mind. She was no longer Amy, but Amy and Tegan. Her will to fight vanished.

April helped the battered Sue Ellen to sit up while Tegan, who had regained consciousness with Alan's aid, led the now-pliant Amy by the hand into the mansion.

"Can you stand?" April asked her adopted sister.

"Yes," replied Sue Ellen, straightening her wobbling legs. "No. Yes. No…"

In the palacial Belnap living room, Alan and Tegan held Amy and Buster in mental thrall. They were doing something they had never attempted before. They had no choice.

April's cat ears picked up a loud buzzing in the distance. It grew closer. It reminded her of the swarm of killer bees she had faced in Tanzania.

_A siren_, she thought.

Tegan switched her barette to the up position. She and Alan looked at each other and smiled with satisfaction. They looked at Amy and Buster.

Amy and Buster looked at themselves. They gasped in shock.

"What…what…" Buster choked out, clutching at his ears.

"Omigosh," exclaimed the dumbfounded Amy. "I'm wearing a dress. And my voice…it's…"

"MIRROR!" the two cried out together.

There was a broad full-size mirror in Amy's bedroom, and they almost fell over each other in their haste to reach it. Alan and Tegan followed them, grinning.

"How did you do this?" shouted Buster/Amy (Amy in Buster's body) as he glared at his reflection.

"How we did it is unimportant," said Tegan calmly. "But we can undo it, if you cooperate."

"I'm a girl," marveled Amy/Buster (Buster in Amy's body), running her fingers through her blond hair. "This is weird, but kinda cool. How'd you switch us? Is it permanent?"

Alan was about to respond, when a chiming sound was heard by all.

"The police!" exclaimed Buster/Amy.

As he led Alan and Tegan toward the entrance, Tegan warned him, "If you want your body back, you'll tell them nothing's wrong."

The door flew open as the cat-girl-turned-rabbit-boy approached it. A cat woman with a blue uniform, cap, and badge stood before them, the dim sun creating a glow around her. Further back, another policewoman was examining the bruises on Sue Ellen's face while April watched.

"What can we do to help?" the cat woman asked in Yordilian.

"We won't be needing your services after all," replied Buster/Amy in the same language. "Two girls had a pretty bad scrap, but as you can see, it's over."

"You speak well for an Earth boy," the officer remarked.

"Thanks," said Buster/Amy, blushing.

The policewomen returned to their white and blue hovercar, and April supported Sue Ellen as she hobbled into the mansion. Together with Alan and Tegan they returned to the bedroom, where they found Amy/Buster in a state of…

"Get dressed, Buster," said Alan, shielding his eyes.

"Hey, wouldn't _you_ look?" said Amy/Buster.

"You made a smart choice," Tegan commended Buster/Amy. "Now if you'll set up a portal, we'll all go to Earth, and you'll be returned to your own body."

"I don't think so," said Buster/Amy with a smirk.

Alan and Tegan fell silent. Amy/Buster froze while trying to put on her dress.

"I think I'll stay like this," Buster/Amy went on. "Being a boy has its advantages. For one thing, I can have any girl I choose."

"Tell me you're joking," said Amy/Buster, startled.

Tegan reached for her barette, but Buster/Amy motioned for her to stop. "Switch us back and I'll call the police again," he threatened.

"Wonderful," April grumbled. "The body switching thing again."

The lady servant stepped into the room, made curious by the earnest nature of the conversation. "Marmel, go and create a portal so my friends can return to Earth," he instructed her in flawless Yordilian.

Marmel stood still, wondering how the rabbit boy had become so fluent and why he thought he could command her. She glanced over at Amy/Buster, who was too terrified to raise any objections. Then she turned on her heel and left the room.

Buster/Amy turned to the others and grinned triumphantly. "What are you all waiting for? You're free. Go home. There's a portal to Earth waiting."

Alan shook his head in incredulous defeat. The others only gaped.

"Go home, or I'll call the police on you," said Buster/Amy more firmly.

Amy/Buster swallowed. Her heart pounded.

She slipped her arms into the sleeves of her dress.

"Come on, guys," she said weakly. "Being a girl isn't so bad. I can live with it."

"Stop talking like that," said Alan sharply.

Marmel entered the room again. "The portal is ready," she informed Buster/Amy.

"You heard the lady," said the rabbit boy sternly. "Now get moving. You have one minute, and then I'm calling the cops."

Seeing no alternative, Alan, Tegan, Sue Ellen, and April shuffled after Amy/Buster and Marmel, heads bowed. April reached up and fastened the zipper on the back of Amy/Buster's dress.

"At least you'll have lots of girls to hang out with," said Sue Ellen as she approached the glowing gateway alongside Amy/Buster.

"And I think you'll enjoy kissing boys," Tegan added.

"Enough talk," Buster/Amy urged them. "Go! Go!"

Amy/Buster stepped up to the portal first, if for no other reason to encourage her friends by her example. She poked a finger through the misty passage, glanced down at her dress, sighed, and wondered what life as a female would be like.

She lifted her foot to take a step, and then an idea struck her. She stopped cold.

"Wait," she said cunningly. "I kinda like it here. I think I'll stay."

Buster/Amy's jaw dropped.

"You can't stay here," Alan snapped at the boy-turned-girl.

"Why not?" said Amy/Buster with a dramatic sweep of her arms. "I own the place, don't I?"

"No more jokes," Buster/Amy ordered.

Amy/Buster gazed seductively at him. "I never realized how cute I am before," she said sweetly. "I understand now why you picked me."

Buster/Amy started to sweat.

"I like being Amy," Amy/Buster told her friends. "The rest of you go ahead—I'm going to stay here and marry Buster."

"You are _so_ not going to marry me!" Buster/Amy shrieked. "Why should I choose a freak like you, when I can have any girl I…"

Only then did he recognize the trap in which he had ensnared himself.

"Because…I'm bound…to you," he mumbled miserably.

Sue Ellen and April tried not to giggle.

"Bloody brilliant," Alan whispered to Amy/Buster.

"So," said Tegan to the morose rabbit boy, "are you coming or not?"

Buster/Amy didn't answer.

"Wait a minute," said Alan suddenly. "I just thought of a solution that should make everybody happy."

----

to be continued


	25. Betrayal

Dudley Green sat on a playground bench, having eaten very little for lunch. He seldom desired food, and his waist had shriveled to a ghost of its former self. His nose, from which the cast had recently been removed, was buried in a fifth-grade history book. So much had taken place in the past three hundred years—wars, alliances, inventions—that once he started reading about the things he'd missed, he couldn't stop.

A convertible pulled up to the side of the street, driven by a woman with antlers. Two floppy-haired cat girls jumped out. He knew them immediately as they approached.

"Hello, girls," he greeted Sue Ellen and April.

"Come with us," Sue Ellen urged him.

"You look like you were in a fight," Dudley observed. "Did you win?"

"Just come on," said the girl, grabbing his elbow. "We're going to make a girl out of you."

"Indeed," said the rat boy, closing his book and stumbling after them. "How do you propose to do that, pray tell?"

----

Tegan moved her barette to the top of her head and grinned at Alan. Before them, Amy, Buster, and Dudley began to wonder at their new forms. April and Sue Ellen watched from the edge of Amy's bed as the switched kids gazed at their reflections.

"I'm me again," said Buster with relief. "Not that there was anything wrong with being a girl."

"The nose is a bit crooked," said Amy through Dudley's mouth, "but Yordilian girls can't afford to be too picky about looks. It'll do."

No one was more pleased with the transformation than Dudley, now a happy inhabitant of Amy Belnap's body.

"I'm a girl again! I'm a girl!" she cheered.

"And this time it's for good," said Alan with confidence.

"Bless you, Alan!" gushed Amy/Dudley. "May I kiss you? It's been so long since I've kissed a boy."

"Kiss away."

Dudley/Amy watched in amusement while Amy/Dudley smothered Alan's face with grateful kisses. "You're all free to go," he announced.

"Good luck with your new life as a boy," April said to him. "Feel free to drop by if you're ever in our solar system."

"Too bad we didn't get to finish our fight," said Dudley/Amy. "You probably could have beaten me."

The excited Amy/Dudley led the march to the interstellar portal. "I can't wait to show my new body to all my friends," she enthused.

"Should we start calling you Dolly again?" asked Alan.

"If it's not too much trouble."

She virtually floated through the gateway to Earth. Alan and Tegan followed close behind, and then Sue Ellen and April.

Marmel switched off the portal and looked quizzically at the rat boy in front of her.

"Get the hovercar ready," he commanded. "I'm going to walk around the neighborhood a bit, and when I come back, we're going shopping."

Three Yordilian cat girls in swim suits were frolicking in a sprinkler when Dudley, formerly Amy, strolled past. "Hello there," he called to them.

"Hi," said one of the girls, waving politely.

Dudley shrugged and walked on. He had expected a more enthusiastic greeting.

"Who was that?" another of the girls wondered.

"Just another Earth boy," replied the first girl.

----

A large crowd of kids and adults assembled at Buster's condo to welcome him home. Amazon Puppy, delighted at the return of her master, sniffed the boy's pants for traces of food he might have picked up on his long journey.

"There I was, trapped on an alien world, surrounded by lovesick girls with ninja powers," he recounted. "I held them off for as long as I could, and just as my strength was near its end, my friends came to rescue me."

April and Sue Ellen nodded. They could have easily refuted his story and countered it with the tale of his temporary transformation into a girl, but they didn't want to spoil his moment.

"What about Alan and Prunella?" Bitzi inquired. "Why aren't they here? Why are they hiding from us?"

"It must have something to do with Alan's queer magical powers," said Dolly the blond cat girl.

"Er, Dolly, about that word 'queer'…" Muffy cautioned her.

Snacks were served, and those in attendance had to hurry to obtain their share before Buster ate them all.

"I love both of you so much," said Mrs. Krantz to her adopted daughters. "But if you want to go back to your natural parents, I support you."

"That's not an option at the moment," said April. "My trial date is a week away."

A few minutes later, Sue Ellen and Buster seized upon the same carrot stick at once. After a brief tug of war, Sue Ellen let go.

"I know better than to fight with a rabbit over a carrot," she quipped.

"I think it's so cool that you're an alien," said Buster through a mouthful of carrot.

"I still consider myself a human," Sue Ellen told him. "I want to be treated like one."

"Okay, Sue Alien," Buster joked.

"I liked you better as a girl," Sue Ellen grumbled.

----

It was still dark outside, but the sun was rising in Prunella's heart.

"I remember yesterday," she whispered to herself. "I'm cured."

She bolted into a sitting position. Tegan and Claire, lying in the bed next to her, mumbled and turned over.

"I'm cured! I'm cured!" Prunella cried out loud.

"You're cured?" Tegan marveled. "The operation was a success?"

"Yes, I remember everything that happened yesterday," said the rat girl. "Except for the whole time I was being operated on."

"That's wonderful!" exclaimed Tegan.

"C'est magnifique," added Claire.

"Let's go tell everybody," said Prunella.

After everyone had bathed and dressed, Bernie prepared a special breakfast for the group. It was the usual bacon and pancakes, but it was special because Prunella had regained the use of her short-term memory.

"This makes me so happy," said Alan.

"Yes, thank goodness for aliens," said Tegan.

"We're all very happy for Prunella," said Mansch. "But now let's get down to business. Jack and Shelly, the two children we liberated last night, are staying at the home of another of my associates."

"He thinks Fern's a nice girl too," Bernie interjected.

"Shelly's powers of telepathy are a wonder to behold," Mansch went on. "As for Jack, he's uncertain about his powers, and doesn't want to tell us exactly what they are."

"Maybe he thinks his powers are evil," said C.V. "I should have a talk with him."

"However, Jack has informed us of another school, one in Willardville, where a boy with phenomenal powers of memory is being held."

"Powers of memory?" mused Victor. "Why would they lock up a kid for that?"

"I don't know," answered Mansch, "but we'll find out, won't we?"

Alan hesitantly raised his hand. "Er, excuse me, Mr. Mansch."

"Yes, Alan?"

The bear boy stood. "If you're planning to break into another school, I'm afraid I'll have to opt out."

A hush passed over the table.

"Opt out?" said Mansch. "Why?"

"You know why," said Alan with more boldness. "I only teamed up with you to help Prunella. Now that she's cured, I have no reason to stay here."

"What about me?" Tegan shot back. "I'm a reason."

"I care about you, Tegan," Alan went on. "But let's be realistic. These people are criminals. They think they're doing the right thing, but sooner or later, someone's going to get hurt or killed."

Mansch shot Tegan a meaningful glance, then rose from the table and strolled away.

"Let's talk, Alan," Tegan urged her brother.

They found a corner where they could be alone, although they were sure that Victor, at least, could hear every word they said.

"I wish you would stay with us," said Tegan earnestly. "We have so much work to do. There are hundreds of Brainchildren to be set free."

"Then set them free," Alan responded. "But not like this." He weighed his next statement carefully. "Why do you need Mansch, anyway? You're as smart as he is, if not smarter. You can lead the Brainchildren as well as he can."

"No, I can't," Tegan insisted. "He's a great leader. He's a great man."

Alan could scarcely manage to keep his voice down to a mutter. "You're being naïve, Tegan. If he didn't have you, he'd be up to his old tricks. Have you forgotten that he tried to frame Molly's dad? Have you forgotten that he kidnapped Fern?"

Mansch drew near to them as they debated. The cat man was concealing an object in one hand.

"I hope you've convinced your brother to see reason," he addressed Tegan with a sinister tone.

"I've already seen reason," Alan snapped. "And it's not you."

"Then I'm sorry it has to come to this."

Trepidation filled Alan's heart. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm not going to do anything," replied Mansch. "I'm just going to stand here…"

"…while I change the way you think," said Tegan, reaching for her barette.

"No!" cried Alan. "You wouldn't do that to your brother!"

"Soon you'll be just like Ray," said Tegan wickedly.

Startled by the outcry, Prunella leaped from her chair. "What are they doing to him?"

"Do not interfere, _ma cherie_," said Claire, and the rat girl found herself unable to move a muscle.

"You remember what happened the last time you tried to put someone else's personality in my head," said Alan angrily.

"This time will be different," said Tegan. "This time you'll be unconscious."

Mansch uncovered the object he held in his hand—a small spray can. He pointed the nozzle at Alan's face…

"Stop it!" shouted C.V., jumping up. Before he had a chance to exercise his fear power on Mansch, a mental bolt from Claire sent him flying against a wall. He slumped to the floor, his glasses askew.

Alan had never been more frightened. Not when he had learned that his son had traveled from the future to kill Francine. Not when he had gazed into the sky at an exploding sun. Not when he had awoken in a hospital with Prunella's body and a bad case of amnesia. Not even when C.V. had beamed pure fear into his mind. In a short moment he would be asleep, then wake up as a new person. An evil person…

Just as Mansch tensed his fingers to apply the knockout gas, Alan beheld a startling yet familiar image. The villainous cat man's memories, all of them, were laid out before his view like an endless field of sagebrush. No juniper was evident, as it had been on previous occasions.

Alan glanced over at Tegan. Her hands were raised, but she hadn't lowered her barette.

There was no time to think. No time to be selective.

He made the sagebrush disappear. All of it.

Mansch's eyes rolled back into his head.

Tegan watched in horror as the cat man plummeted to his knees, his face frozen in a glazed mask. He dropped to one side. Saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth. He breathed loudly and heavily.

Alan said something he had never said before.

"Oh, my God…"

Furious, Tegan grabbed him by the shoulders. "You wiped his mind!" she yelled. "How did you do it? We weren't merged! We weren't…"

Seeing no point in taking out her anger on her brother, she knelt and rolled the catatonic cat man onto his back. He stared up at her with empty eyes. Tears began to flow down her cheeks.

Terror in all its forms gripped Alan as the meaning of what had happened dawned upon him. He had to get away.

"Come on, Prunella," he called to his friend. "We're leaving." Looking around at the other children, he added, "And don't try to stop us, or you'll end up like him."

Bernie and the Brainchildren recoiled in terror, except for C.V., who was struggling to raise himself from the floor.

Freed from Claire's telekinetic grasp, Prunella hurried after Alan. The two children raced away from Bernie's house with utmost speed. They didn't stop until they were three blocks away.

They stopped. They were in an unfamiliar part of the city. They didn't care.

Alan turned to Prunella, a look of pale horror on his face. "Don't ever tell anyone what just happened," he said pleadingly.

"Why not?" asked the confused girl. "Did you kill him?"

Alan shook his head. "He'll recover, but he won't be the man he was."

"I didn't like the man he was," said Prunella glibly.

"I just erased a man's mind," said Alan, grim emotion in his voice. "I wasn't merged with Tegan. I did it on my own." He took in a desperate breath. "And I could do it again."

"They'll lock you up if they find out," Prunella realized.

"They won't find out," said Alan desperately. "They can't. They mustn't."

"I won't tell anyone."

"Thank you."

Alan took Prunella by the hand, and they ambled along the sidewalk in search of a payphone.

Half an hour later Mrs. Powers drove up to the curb next to them, and they loaded themselves into her car.

She began to drive. "I want you to tell me everything that happened, from the beginning," she said coldly. "Once you're finished, I'll decide on a punishment."

"We met some aliens, we rescued Buster, and Prunella's brain is fixed," Alan told her. "That's all you need to know."

"Like hell it is," said his mother.

Alan remained silent. Any carelessly chosen word might consign him to his doom.

He pictured Mansch lying on the floor of Bernie's house, reduced to the level of a drooling infant. _They'll figure it out_, he thought. _They'll know it was me._

----

to be continued


	26. Flight

The scene was Alan's house, and the mood was tense and grim. Upon hearing that Prunella had been recovered, her parents rushed to the scene and besieged her with questions. An hour had passed, and both children remained taciturn.

"You claim that space aliens repaired your brain," said Mrs. Prufrock to her daughter. "That's utterly absurd. If aliens were anywhere near Earth, I'd have picked up their vibrations."

"Alan, you're not leaving this house until you tell me the truth about where you were and what happened to you," Mrs. Powers demanded.

"The same goes for you, Prunella," said Mr. Prufrock. "I mean, you're not leaving _our_ house, once we get there."

The two classmates dared not speak a word. Alan stared at the floor hard enough to burn a hole in the carpet. Prunella's rat nose drooped with sadness.

"If you were with the Brainchildren, we need to know," said Mr. Powers firmly. "They're a danger to the rest of us. They need to be taken into custody."

_And what am I?_ thought Alan. _What will you do to me if I tell you that I just destroyed a man's identity?_

"We'll get the truth out of you one way or another," said Mrs. Powers to her son. "Now if you'll pardon me, I'm going to fix dinner, then send you to bed without it."

Alan gazed at his mother as she strolled into the kitchen. His mind's eye beheld a shifting desert of sagebrush and juniper, linked to the woman's memories by some mechanism he could control but not understand. Everyone in the room presented the same picture to him.

Everyone except Prunella. _Why?_

As Mrs. Powers reached for a head of arugula lettuce in the crisper, a knock came at the door. "Will you get that, dear?" she called out.

_Must be Dolly, come to thank me for turning her back into a girl_. The prospect brought a bit of cheer to Alan's troubled heart.

His father pulled the door open. Every eye in the room went wide.

C.V. Oberlin stood in the doorway.

The owl boy trained his bespectacled eyes on Alan. "You're one of us now," he said with a menacing air. "Come along quietly, or we'll tell your folks everything."

Alan leaped to his feet, his mouth gaping, his hopes shattered. His father lunged forward, seizing the intruder by his flabby, feathery arms. C.V. expressed no worry, but merely flicked his eyelashes.

A wave of intense fear bolted through the house.

Alan had been on the receiving end of C.V.'s fear-projecting powers before, but never at such an extreme level. The very furniture seemed to swirl around him in a dizzying blur. Losing all reason, he put his hands over his face and shrieked in agony.

Both his and Prunella's parents felt the full brunt of C.V.'s mental attack, and were writhing in terror within seconds. The house echoed with their delirious screams.

C.V. folded his arms and grinned confidently—until he noticed that his fear blast was having no effect on Prunella.

The puzzled rat girl glanced around at the tormented adults. She didn't know why she had been spared, only that C.V. had to be stopped at once.

Snarling with rage, she threw herself at the overweight owl boy, knocking him onto the doorstep and sending his glasses flying. "Stop!" she bellowed, tightening her fingers around her gasping enemy's throat. "Stop it or I'll kill you!"

The two struggled as the screams from the living room subsided. Evenly matched for size, Prunella and C.V. rolled in the grass and exchanged blows. Prunella gained the advantage due to C.V.'s fuzzy vision, and the owl boy stood and fled, leaving both his cracked glasses and diabetic I.D. bracelet lying on the concrete.

Both of Alan's parents raced out of the house and pursued the frightened boy, hardly noticing the raven-haired bulldog girl who stood at a nearby corner and watched them with striking blue eyes.

_Stop!_ a female voice shouted in their heads. Mr. and Mrs. Powers halted and looked around, unsure of who was speaking to them.

Alan heard the voice as well. Racing to the window, he spotted the blue-eyed little girl on the other side of the street.

_You were warned, Alan_, uttered the disembodied voice. _Now your parents will know what you are, and what you have done._

Alan's heart churned. _It's her_, he realized. _The telepathic girl from Scepter City. I've got to shut her up!_ He hurried to the door, certain that he would do something dire to the girl.

_Your son is a Brainchild_, the voice continued. _He has the ability to erase memories from the minds of others._

_We know that_, thought Alan's mother.

_He can only do that when he's merged with his sister_, thought Alan's father.

"What's going on?" Prunella asked Alan's motionless parents.

_Not anymore_, spoke the girl's voice. _His powers have expanded_. _He wiped the mind of our leader…_

The telepathic message was cut short as the girl, frightened by Alan's approach, ran away down the sidewalk.

_Just a little closer_, thought the bear boy as he pursued her with vigor. _Wait…what am I doing? What if I accidentally erase her mind, like I did with Mansch?_

He slowed down and watched dolefully as the girl sped around a corner and vanished.

Turning about, he saw the indignant expressions on the faces of his parents, and groaned. _This is it. I am so doomed._

"Get inside," said Mr. Powers as his son shuffled closer.

Once Mrs. Powers had locked the door, she marched to the kitchen and picked up the telephone receiver. "I'm calling the school," she told Alan. "If what we heard is true, then you need to be examined."

All of Alan's entrails sank at once. It mattered nothing that they were his parents—they had locked up his sister, and they would lock him up as well.

"I'm sorry, Alan," said Prunella with pity as she laid a hand on her classmate's shoulder.

Alan gently brushed her hand away. He hadn't yet run out of desperate acts.

"Uh, Mom," he said with a devious smile, "how will you call the school if you don't know the number?"

Mrs. Powers gave him a patronizing stare. This was followed by a confused look.

"Er, honey," she said, lowering the phone, "do you remember the number of the school?"

Alan's father opened his mouth. Alan peered at him, and he closed it again.

"I, uh, forgot it," he admitted with a shrug.

"What are you doing?" asked Prunella in a rumbling whisper. Alan ignored her.

"I've got it written down on the Rolodex," said Mrs. Powers, stepping out of the kitchen.

_No, you don't_, Alan thought at her.

His mother stopped in her tracks halfway to the den. "Er, where was I going?"

"To find the phone number for Ballford Prep," Mr. Powers reminded her.

_You remember nothing about Ballford Prep_, thought Alan, deftly pruning a patch of sagebrush from his mother's memory.

"Ballford _what?_" Mrs. Powers gaped in confusion at her husband.

"Stop it, Alan," Prunella muttered to her friend. "You're scaring me."

"Not half as much as I'm scaring myself," Alan responded.

His parents stared and gesticulated, trying to make sense of what they were saying to each other. "I'm going to Arthur's to play video games," he informed them.

"You're staying right here," said his father. "You're not safe as long as the Brainchildren are out there."

"None of us is safe," remarked Mr. Prufrock, who, along with his wife, was recovering from the fear attack by relaxing on the couch.

Alan shook his head glumly. _There's only one way to get them off my case_, he realized.

Focusing his attention on Prunella's parents and his own, he executed the horrific deed.

The adults blinked and looked about quickly, as if coming out of sleep. Their stupefied expressions caused Prunella tremendous concern.

"Hello," said Mrs. Prufrock to Alan. "I don't know you. Are you a friend of Prunella's?"

Alan smiled warmly and nodded.

Prunella's jaw plunged halfway to the floor. "Play along," Alan urged her.

"You look hungry," said Mrs. Powers to her son. "I've got some cookies in the jar. Do you like oatmeal raisin?"

"No, thank you," Alan replied. "Prunella and I are going to Muffin Man for a bite, then I'm flying back to Walla Walla."

"Have a safe trip," said Mr. Powers cheerily. "Visit us again soon."

Without further ado, Alan walked through the front doorway, followed by the visibly outraged Prunella.

"You made them forget you!" the rat girl shouted when they were half a block away. "Are you out of your mind?"

"Yes," Alan acknowledged sadly. "Yes, I am."

"I supposed you'll make _me_ forget you next," said Prunella, a tinge of worry in her voice.

"I can't," said Alan. "Something about your brain makes you immune. You've got to promise not to tell anyone that I've gone."

"Gone?" Prunella blurted out. "Where?"

"I'm not sure," answered Alan, a tear forming in his eye. "Someplace where the Brainchildren and my parents won't find me."

"Don't leave," said Prunella earnestly, grabbing her friend by the shoulders. "We'll fight this."

"I _am_ fighting it," said Alan with a tone of hopelessness.

Prunella bent her knees and buried her face in Alan's shirt, letting out muffled sobs. "I promise…I promise I won't tell anyone."

Mrs. Powers watched the touching scene from her porch. "She cares a lot about that boy," she remarked to her husband.

"Did we ever get his name?" was Mr. Powers' response.

Having taken leave of Prunella, Alan trudged along the street, his hands in his pockets. He didn't know if he would see his parents again. He certainly didn't want to see the Brainchildren, or the sister that had betrayed him, again. His only hope for freedom was to move, and keep moving.

* * *

THE END 


End file.
